Written Saturday, December 20, 2008
Oh, Kyrgyzstan. The land of many firsts. First time learning Russian, for instance. First time in an apartment. First time my oven exploded. First time getting evicted from an apartment. You know. The glory of firsts.
Yesterday, I had three friends over at my place. Two of ‘em were a married couple that lives about an hour away from the city; I had been extolling the virtues of my new pad and they wanted to come check it out. That and my friend is good at haircutting, and my hair was getting long enough in the back to grease it up into a duck’s ass, so I figured I should take advantage of her skills.
The third was another volunteer out from Talas. He needed to be in Osh, the south of the country, by late today. He left Talas yesterday, but it’s virtually impossible to get a taxi to go straight to Osh from Talas, so he made a pit stop in Bishkek first. As it’s about a six hour ride from Talas to Bishkek, completing the ten to twelve hour Bishkek-Osh route would have been a lot in one day. So I said he could crash at my place.
We all got back to my apartment around sixish. We had picked up some fixin’s for dinner at the bazaar, as all I really had at my place were carrots, potatoes, radishes, and some rice and eggs. (I eat stir fry more often than not these days, as it’s a filling meal that’s got quite the vegetable content and is easy to cook. Add an egg for protein and it’s as well-rounded as it’s ever going to get. However, I didn’t have enough on hand for four people, and it was worth getting something a bit fancier.)
The married couple offered to haul some of their coal over. You see, the house had a banya, but I had never fired it up for myself because a) it was too much friggin’ trouble to go through the process of firing it up just for one person, and b) the house was gas heated, so I didn’t have any coal. But there was gonna be four of us in residence that night, so we all figured that it might be worth our while, to get a nice warm place to bathe.
So, we started dinner (a tasty pre-prepared laghman, which is basically noodles with spices and vegetables), poured a couple of glasses of beer, and got the banya lit up. All and all, a pretty tame evening. We had plans to watch some movies after we bathed.
Except, in the middle of the banya-firing, my landlady came by. Now, I hadn’t seen hide nor tail of her in a while, so I was pretty surprised when she showed up. And she was pissed. (I can only assume that she had the neighbors call if it looked like I had any guests over… we weren’t being loud by any stretch of the imagination. In addition, the nights when I was alone, I was up until the electricity went out, about 11pm, blasting my music. So it couldn’t have been a noise thing.)
First, she started lecturing me about having too many people over. We actually had a discussion about this when I moved in; initially, she wanted me to ask before I had anybody over, but when I was definitely not agreeing to that, she said that I could have one or two people over occasionally. I wasn’t planning on throwing a beer blast, so I didn’t think this was unreasonable. Sure, I had three people over that night, but we weren’t doing anything rowdy or loud, so I didn’t figure it would be a problem. Well, apparently, I was wrong.
Also, she was spitting mad about the fact that I was using the banya. When I moved in, I said that I probably wouldn’t be using it much since I was living alone and it was too much trouble. But, I didn’t think that precluded me from using it entirely. Plus, the banya was located in a separate building, which I actually had the key to. There were certain parts and separate buildings of the house that were locked off to me, and most of them I didn’t care much about, but the banya rooms were unlocked. She was pissed off because the banya room was dirty, which bewildered me because I said I didn’t care. Besides, if she was so pissed off about it, maybe she should have cleaned it before I moved in. It’s not as though she didn’t have a week’s notice to do anything about it.
But after tearing into me in front of my guests, she stormed out of the house, saying she’d be back tomorrow. I was a little unsettled, but we went on with our evening.
The next morning, the friend from Talas left early, as he had to go wrangle a taxi to the south. My other two friends and I slowly got up, washed the dishes, cleaned up the house and rearranged the furniture back, as we had moved some things in order to get all the beds I had into my room, which was the warmest room in the house.
The landlady comes back at about nine, still pissed off as all hell. She got on my case about having so many people over again, and I tried to explain that I had the one person over because he was from Talas and needed a place to stay, and she said, and I quote, “That’s your problem.”
Then, she demanded my keys to the house, which I gave her. And she went outside and started storming around, dismantling the table I had set up in front of the outdoor couch I had used for my morning coffee breaks, and yelling about how I needed to find a new place to live. At this point, I realized I was out of my league here with my own Russian, and tried to call my program manager to talk to her. Unfortunately, I couldn’t get a hold of her, so I called the program manager for the NGO workers instead, as one of my friends had her number. I got a hold of her, and handed the phone to my landlady.
There was much yelling going on outside, so we waited for it to end, and the landlady came back and handed the phone to me. The program manager told me that the landlady was pissed off because of the people I had over, and the use of the banya, which I knew about, but was also complaining that the house was dirty and I was living “like a homeless person.”
This I cannot comprehend, as I swept and mopped the house pretty regularly, did a couple loads of laundry, always made sure to empty the slop bucket from the gravity sink when it was full, and did dishes virtually the second I was done using them. (And, frankly, the house wasn’t all that clean when I got it, anyway.) The program manager also told me that the landlady had initially wanted me out of the house that day, but the program manager told her that that was an unreasonable amount of time, and that I at least needed a week.
When I heard all of this I was pissed, namely because the landlady was gone at that point, and she had taken the keys, so I had no way to lock the house. There was no way I was going to leave all my worldly belongings around in an unlocked house, so I just started packing up immediately. I called my counterpart and told her what happened (she was shocked), but she wasn’t in the village at the moment, but she said she’d try to talk to the landlady when she got back.
To which I told her not to bother, because there was no way in hell I was staying in that house. Frankly, if it was the last friggin’ house in Kyrgyzstan, I’d erect a yurt in the schoolyard. We packed up all my stuff, and my friends stayed in the house with it all so I could go to the closest bazaar and pick up a taxi to help me haul it.
Once I got the taxi, we loaded all my things into the car and drove it over to the village English center, as the only people who have keys to it are myself and my counterpart, and just dropped it all off there. I’m currently at my friends’ village, staying with them, as I am now essentially homeless.
My counterpart called me when I was waiting for the matshruka to go to my friends’ village, and she said that the landlady had agreed to let me stay in the house for the rest of the week, to which I said, “piss on that.”
Frankly, it’s infuriating. I am not a child. I understand that if I am living in a place where I’m renting, if I break or destroy something, it is my responsibility to fix or replace it. If I have guests over and they break or destroy something, it’s my responsibility to replace it. Now, if I was having twenty people over at a time for nightly keg stands, then, yeah, I could see how she might be slightly perturbed about my lifestyle. However, if I have three people over for dinner, a movie, and bathing for crying out loud, it’s not her business. If I’m paying her rent, an amount that she agreed to, then I get to live my life the way I want to live it, provided it’s not destructive to her property.
But my counterpart then asked how I was going to get to work next week, as the village where I’m staying now is about an hour outside the city, which is a difficult commute, to say the least. I said that I don’t know. Because I don’t. In all likelihood I won’t be at work this week, because I have no place to live this week. Today I actually had three classes to teach and a Russian lesson, but I didn’t get to do any of that because I had to pack and move at the drop of a hat.
This presents several problems, though. The main one being, I have no place to live. My friends here said I could crash with them as long as I needed to, and when I got to the Peace Corps office today I told my tale of woe to the volunteers there I got offered a couple other apartments to stay in, due to my compatriots’ generosity. Secondly, I have no way to get to work or go about my routine. This will essentially be solved by itself in less than a week, though, as it’s basically the end of the year and break starts soon.
I finally got a hold of my program manager, and she suggested a site change. Again. Which, really, is looking more and more appealing. I’d really hate to leave my village, as, despite it all, I like it there. I’m comfortable. I really love working at the school, and my counterpart is amazing. I love the proximity to Bishkek, and all the opportunities that affords me. However, she said that she’d put me in a place that has actual apartments, and the fact that, well, I have no place to live in my village now kind of puts a damper on things.
If there’s any silver lining to all of this, it’s that I actually hadn’t paid rent on the house yet. I made a couple of overtures towards it, but I think that people generally pay towards the end of the month here, rather than the beginning. Another plus was that I didn’t sign a housing agreement with the landlady. People don’t really get into contracts about housing here, but Peace Corps has housing contracts that we sign, mostly so there’s an official record of how much we pay a month so our housing allowances can be adjusted accordingly. However, I never signed one… I was going to, but considering how I only lived in the place for two weeks, I didn’t have enough time to get my marbles about me to do it.
The point there is that landlady bitch ain’t getting a single som from my ass. She can try, but then I’ll point out that she treated me like shit and then took the keys from me so I couldn’t lock the house. If she complains, I’ll just say the same thing she told me when I said I had a friend from Talas that needed a place to stay. Namely, “that’s your problem.”
In fact, I hope she wants money. I really do. I even already have my speech planned out. In English, of course, because I assume that either my counterpart or program manager will be there for this conversation. It will go something like this: “Oh, really? Well, listen, bitch, because you’re not getting a single som from me. And, furthermore, for all the times you yelled at me because you were speaking in rapid fire Russian and I didn’t understand, fuck you. My Russian isn’t that good. I know that. I’ve lived in this country for five months. I’d like to see you go to America, and see how good your English is after five months, because I bet it’d be worse than my Russian. You don’t understand how hard this is. And that’s fine, because you’ll never see the world beyond your goddamn front door. And that’s fine too, because you can have your front door, and you can have your mother’s front door, all of it. But you treated me awfully. And I never signed a contract with you, so you can’t even prove I lived in that house short of DNA testing, and if you want to fork out the cash for that, go ahead. And go to hell, while you’re at it. And sit on a dick.” [insert flipping the bird here]
This has all really made me take stock of what I’m doing here, and if it’s worth it. Is it? To be honest, I don’t really know. I’m mostly just waiting to see how the chips fall out at this point. But this won’t beat me, goddamn it, because… well, just because. I won’t let it. Something will work out. It has to. I don’t want to go back home yet. …now, to be honest, I can’t say exactly why I don’t want to go back, because between the exploding ovens and landlady issues and whatever the hell else has been going on, life’s been kind of bad recently. But for whatever reason, for the moment I want to stick it out. Maybe it’s nothing but a combination of pride and stubbornness, but it’s keeping me here for now.
Of course, if everything goes absolutely to hell, I’ll go back. At the moment, I don’t see how much worse it can get, though, considering how I’m homeless. If I can put up with this, I figure I can deal with just about anything else that comes at me.
Though, I guess I actually am living like a homeless person at the moment. Maybe the landlady was right.
Or maybe she can go suck a fat one.
Written Tuesday, December 23, 2008
Hey guys!
It’s… Christmas carol time!
Oh, you’ve got to be homeless for the holidays…
in Russian you’d say that I’m “bez dom”
If you want to be awesome in a million ways…
Spend a Kyrgyz De-cem-ber without a home!
Though, technically, I’m actually “bez doma,” but grammar don’t count when you’re singing. Or blogging.
Sweet. As Charles Dickens once made a child say, “God bless us, everyone except my stupid landlady. What a twat.”
Merry Christmas!
Tuesday, December 23, 2008
Wednesday, December 17, 2008
.there will still be love in the world
Written Monday, December 15, 2008
It’s amazing how difficult it is to not get paid.
My landlady’s son comes over every day to feed the dogs. At first I was a little perturbed by this, as it means that essentially I’m going to have a checking-up-on daily, but then I got over it. He’s not intrusive, and the dogs get fed a hell of a lot better than if I had to do it on my own dime. Furthermore, it’s one less thing I have to worry about.
But the son is actually a nice guy, and tries to exercise his limited English vocabulary every chance he gets. For about three days straight when he came by in the evening to feed the dogs and I was sitting outside, he greeted me with a cheery “good morning.” While this was cute, I felt bad about letting the clear mix-up in greetings slide, and corrected him.
So, he wants English lessons. As mentioned previously, I’ve tried to stay out of the individual tutoring business, but he’s a nice guy and it won’t kill me. The hardest part about it was getting around the conversation about me being paid.
As a Peace Corps Volunteer, I’m forbidden from taking on gainful employment of any sort. The school doesn’t pay me – Peace Corps does. I’m more than welcome (and in fact, actively encouraged) to take on as many side activities from my main job as is my fancy, but I can’t get paid for them. Of course, when I go into Bishkek to teach they reimburse me my travel funds, but I’m not paid for teaching itself. (Though, to be honest, they do over reimburse me a little bit… it costs me sixteen som to get from the school and back, but they just give me a twenty som bill, as it’s easier to do the math. So I guess I am getting paid. A nickel.)
So, I said I’d give the guy English lessons, and he asked me how much I charged. I told him that I was a Volunteer, and thus couldn’t be paid. He at first thought I just didn’t understand what he was saying, but after assuring him that I did understand he was offering payment but was turning it down, he was all like, “But I won’t tell anybody!”
Which I guess could work. Though I’m on paper forbidden to do a lot of things, it’s not as though Peace Corps is hanging all over my back 24/7. Theoretically he could pay me for it, and nobody would ever know. But, I mean, seriously, I took an oath for this shit, and “not being paid” is one of the key parts of all of this. I’d made peace with the fact that I wasn’t going to be making anything akin to actual money for the two years I’m here. In reality it really wasn’t that much of a problem for me in the first place, because as far as I’m concerned what I’m lacking in pay I’m making up for in experience. (…and my loans are on deferral and I’m getting health insurance. So…) I’m learning a new language, becoming accustomed to living abroad in far less luxurious conditions than I’m used to having at my disposal, proving that I can exist in a vastly different cultural arena than that which I grew up in… not to mention, having “Peace Corps” on the resume is a pretty big bang in and of itself.
But I was like, no, no, no, you can’t pay me. (Though, if I was smart, I might have asked him to get his mother to lower my rent. It’s not pay if I don’t see money!) I told him that, if he wanted to repay me, I wanted to learn how to speak Russian better. He laughed and said that he wasn’t a teacher, but he does have a lot of books and he could teach me rhetoric.
Right. Rhetoric. In Russian. I was like, “Dude, you know I’m not all that good at TALKING in Russian. You seriously think it’s time to break out the Socrates?”
Maybe I’ll ask him about Russian music. I like to collect music from the places I go, and I know diddly squat about the music here. About the only time I hear Russian music is when I’m in the matshrukas, and then there’s virtually no way to tell who’s singing the song.
To be honest, though, all he would really have to do is talk to me. That’s the best kind of practice there is. I’m first and foremost concerned with learning to speak well, and then I’ll get more into the semantics and the grammar later. I’m moderately literate as it is, mostly because I spend all my time in matshrukas squinting out the windows and trying to read things. I’m not very good with writing, though. My spelling is atrocious, and I only have the alphabet half-memorized. (Of course, I know all the letters, just not necessarily in order.)
When he comes over to feed the dogs tomorrow night, we’re going to have our first lesson. We’ll see how it goes.
But, another shift in my lifestyle recently has to do with feeding the dogs. The dogs here are actually extremely well-fed by Kyrgyz standards: twice a day. And not only are they fed often, they actually get their own kind of food, as opposed to straight table slops. There’s a meal they make for the dogs out of gretchka, potatoes, and water, and this is usually ladled on top of some bread and whatever meat bones the family happens to have.
But coming over twice a day to feed the dogs is a lot of work on their part, and they asked if I would be willing to take over the chore. They’d pay for the food, I’d just have to be the one to feed them. I said that I’d be willing to do it in the mornings, because I’ll definitely be home, but because my schedule here is so unpredictable, I don’t know if I’ll be able to do it every night. Now, to be honest, I am home by the nighttime feeding of the dogs more often than not. It’s just that occasionally I’m out later, either on business or just with friends, and I’d feel bad having to worry about the dogs not getting fed.
Of course, the big thing about feeding the dogs was me getting close enough to the beastie dog. It has gotten used to me: it doesn’t bark its head off and strain at its chain anymore when I walk in the yard. However, I’d never actually approached it where it would be in potential striking distance.
The little dog and I have made good friends, though. I like to sit on the couch out back and watch the birds and drink my coffee in the morning. At first, the little dog would keep its distance, but after a couple of days, it started getting closer. Finally, it got within petting distance one day, and I mean, come on, I’m a sap, and gave it scratches. Now, whenever I go to sit on the couch, it pretty much jumps in my lap.
On a side note, I have become very good at pet-talk. You know, “Who’s a good girl? Who’s a good dog? It’s you, it’s you!” I can now do this in Russian. Every day, I get a little closer to the dream, I tell you.
But today I had to go retrieve the food bowl from the beastie’s pen, and so I walked up to its circle of chain. The dog started jumping a little, and I was like, “Look. I’m going to feed you. You can’t bite me.”
So, with a prayer to all the gods I could think of, I stepped in the pen. The beastie didn’t seem interested in more than licking at me, though. Just in case I happened to be a giant loaf of bread. You never know. The little dog helped. Whenever I bent down to the food bowl and the beastie would play-lunge and I would get freaked out, the little one would start barking. Like, “Dude, stop messing around, I want breakfast.”
So, operation feed the dogs was a success. I didn’t get mauled. I did feel a little bad, though, because there was only a heel’s worth of bread leftover from last night, so the bowl was mostly meal. And hot water. (They always pour hot water over the dish before serving it… I guess it makes it easier for the dogs to eat.) Oh well.
Look at me! I haul water, light trash fires, wash laundry by hand, feed dogs, and light the gas furnace! I’m like a little old Russian lady! I should get one of those babushka head scarves. It would be sweet.
I actually did go for the triple-point score and attempt to make my own bread. I bought a stove the other day, managed to haul it back (which was an adventure in and of itself), and got to work happily pounding out some bread dough. I love baking.
Unfortunately, my oven blew up. Yep. I had let the dough rise twice and put it in the preheated oven to bake, and was in the other room getting my Nintendo on, when suddenly there was a giant explosion. I at first thought it might have been the gas, so I leapt out of my bed and sprinted to the kitchen.
…where I promptly slipped on glass shards and took a magnificent fall, reminiscent of my rugby days where getting laid out by a woman twice my size was life’s greatest pleasure and reward. Sigh.
Except for the fact that rugby fields aren’t usually made of linoleum and covered with glass. Usually. So I scratched the fuck out of myself and my oven blew up.
Fortunately, I did not buy the oven from the bazaar. I actually bought it from Beta Stores, because after some price comparison, they were far cheaper there than at the bazaar. Maybe it’s because they explode, but this is just a guess.
I do still have the receipt, though. My program manager is coming over today to check out the house, as she wasn’t able to do so before due to the beastie being on too long of a chain. I’ll ask her about Beta’s return policy. And maybe she’ll help me out there, as I don’t know how to say in Russian, “Dude, your oven blew up all over my kitchen the day after I bought it. There had better either be an exchange or a return involved in this story.”
I figure my chances are better getting a return at a store than at the bazaar. Hopefully. We’ll see.
But, you know what they say. If ever your oven explodes, bake, bake again. Or something like that.
Written Wednesday, December 17, 2008
I really can’t believe it’s already into the latter half of December. Time flies, when you’re eating sheep fat.
They’re already making preparations for the new group of Volunteers to come, which is weird. Now, they’ve actually changed the Pre Service Training date for this country… I came ‘round these parts in July, but the new Volunteers are coming in March. This is being done for a bevy of reasons, but mainly for the problem that the administration is having with the TEFL volunteers. You see, in our second year of service, our COS (close of service) date is technically in September of 2010, but most people go for the one-month early COS date and leave sometime near the middle or end of August.
But the school year here ends in May. Which means that the TEFL volunteers are looking at a whole summer’s worth of no real work with nothing but leaving the country at the end of it. Compounding this problem is the rule that PCVs can’t take annual leave during the first three months or their last three months of service. Now, you can do program travel, which means you can go about the country, but you can’t take annual leave and go anywhere else. Most TEFL volunteers, during their first summer, do a combination of travel and summer camps or do a Habitat for Humanity stint over by the lake, but the second summer is mostly consumed by wrapping up whatever projects are still on the table and getting ready to leave the country to go do your next big thing.
However, this usually doesn’t take a whole three months, and a lot of people get stuck in the country with no work, an inability to travel, and about two months left to do absolutely nothing with. Consequently, a lot of Volunteers early terminate during the last summer, mostly due to boredom and a readiness to get on with things. The other problem is graduate school: some of us have plans on yet more book-learning after this, and if you’re planning on entering graduate school, which starts in September, you’re going to need to be back in America before the last days of August. For some dumb reason, Peace Corps will give people the three-month early COS date if you have a job waiting somewhere, but not for graduate school. Ergo, more ETs.
So they’re moving the PST date to March, which would make the COS date for the new volunteers in May of 2008, the end of the school year. This would also solve the problem of people going to graduate school in September, as three months would be enough time to decompress and get your affairs in order to start studying.
Though, I do see some other problems inherent with this new date, namely that the Trainees would swear in as Volunteers in May… which, for us TEFL, is the end of the school year. So the new kids on the block would be in their villages, knowing nobody, and doing nothing for three months. It’s entirely possible that Peace Corps has some sort of plan to get the new Volunteers involved in camps or something of the ilk, but if they’ve got no plans, I have no idea what they’re thinking. Sure, it was a bit fast to drop straight into teaching classes the weekend after swearing in, but it gave me something to do other than sit at home and stare at the ceiling. Community integration is also bolstered incredibly by work, particularly work at a school: virtually every child between the ages of six and seventeen in this village knows who I am, now. I’ve got a routine (of sorts) and I’m comfortable with it.
To be fair, I guess there’s no real prime time to have people come in. A few years back they actually had people coming to country in, like, November, which drops everybody off in the middle of a frigid Central Asian winter, which probably didn’t do much for the ET rate during PST. In spring, you run up against the end of the school year. Summer, the problems I described above. Middle of winter would just be filled with all kinds of stupid. Kyrgyzstan apparently has the highest ET rate out of all the Central Asian countries and Eastern Europe, so I guess whatever they do to change it can’t make it any worse. (For the curious, I’ve been told that the country with the highest rate period is Jordan, due to the very strict Muslim culture. I’ve actually heard that they’ve had entire groups ET. They’re mostly Muslim here, to be sure, but they also slug vodka straight from the bottle so most people are more casual about it than anything else.)
But, anyway, in the realm of teaching, I’m actually done for the year at the school, all things considered. See, I mostly teach on Thursdays, and because last week was the mysterious Olympiad that I couldn’t attend, there was no class. This week is the term exam, so I don’t do anything but show up and practice the math section of the GRE. (Not that I have any plans on taking that in the very near future, but, uh, I can use all the help I can get when it comes to numbers. It’s… been a while.) Next week the students are going to be taking oral exams, so while I will have to listen and evaluate, no teaching. And then, uh, it’s the end of the year.
Wow.
I don’t really have any concrete plans for my winter break: because my school is heated by coal and not electricity, I only have a month off. And In Service Training, which I have to attend, bisects that month. I had been considering going somewhere for two weeks, but I figure I can save some money and keep myself entertained well enough around these parts, considering my proximity to the capital. Maybe I’ll take in a ballet or a play… or see the circus, if it’s in town. (They actually have a permanent building for the circus, here. Lonely Planet describes the architecture of it as a crash-landed UFO from the 1950s, and I can’t come up with anything more astute than that for it.) I’ll go hang out in the foyer of the Hyatt and pretend I have money. I’m not sure about my classes at the TOEFL center, but if they’re in session, I’ll keep teaching there. Maybe I can pick up a few extra classes in exchange for some more Russian lessons.
This summer, I’ll travel. I’ve heard tickets to Prague are relatively cheap, or maybe Emma will come and visit and we’ll do us some China. I don’t think I’ll be wanting to hit up Thailand or India in July, so I’ll head for somewhat cooler locales.
But for now, winter.
It’s amazing how difficult it is to not get paid.
My landlady’s son comes over every day to feed the dogs. At first I was a little perturbed by this, as it means that essentially I’m going to have a checking-up-on daily, but then I got over it. He’s not intrusive, and the dogs get fed a hell of a lot better than if I had to do it on my own dime. Furthermore, it’s one less thing I have to worry about.
But the son is actually a nice guy, and tries to exercise his limited English vocabulary every chance he gets. For about three days straight when he came by in the evening to feed the dogs and I was sitting outside, he greeted me with a cheery “good morning.” While this was cute, I felt bad about letting the clear mix-up in greetings slide, and corrected him.
So, he wants English lessons. As mentioned previously, I’ve tried to stay out of the individual tutoring business, but he’s a nice guy and it won’t kill me. The hardest part about it was getting around the conversation about me being paid.
As a Peace Corps Volunteer, I’m forbidden from taking on gainful employment of any sort. The school doesn’t pay me – Peace Corps does. I’m more than welcome (and in fact, actively encouraged) to take on as many side activities from my main job as is my fancy, but I can’t get paid for them. Of course, when I go into Bishkek to teach they reimburse me my travel funds, but I’m not paid for teaching itself. (Though, to be honest, they do over reimburse me a little bit… it costs me sixteen som to get from the school and back, but they just give me a twenty som bill, as it’s easier to do the math. So I guess I am getting paid. A nickel.)
So, I said I’d give the guy English lessons, and he asked me how much I charged. I told him that I was a Volunteer, and thus couldn’t be paid. He at first thought I just didn’t understand what he was saying, but after assuring him that I did understand he was offering payment but was turning it down, he was all like, “But I won’t tell anybody!”
Which I guess could work. Though I’m on paper forbidden to do a lot of things, it’s not as though Peace Corps is hanging all over my back 24/7. Theoretically he could pay me for it, and nobody would ever know. But, I mean, seriously, I took an oath for this shit, and “not being paid” is one of the key parts of all of this. I’d made peace with the fact that I wasn’t going to be making anything akin to actual money for the two years I’m here. In reality it really wasn’t that much of a problem for me in the first place, because as far as I’m concerned what I’m lacking in pay I’m making up for in experience. (…and my loans are on deferral and I’m getting health insurance. So…) I’m learning a new language, becoming accustomed to living abroad in far less luxurious conditions than I’m used to having at my disposal, proving that I can exist in a vastly different cultural arena than that which I grew up in… not to mention, having “Peace Corps” on the resume is a pretty big bang in and of itself.
But I was like, no, no, no, you can’t pay me. (Though, if I was smart, I might have asked him to get his mother to lower my rent. It’s not pay if I don’t see money!) I told him that, if he wanted to repay me, I wanted to learn how to speak Russian better. He laughed and said that he wasn’t a teacher, but he does have a lot of books and he could teach me rhetoric.
Right. Rhetoric. In Russian. I was like, “Dude, you know I’m not all that good at TALKING in Russian. You seriously think it’s time to break out the Socrates?”
Maybe I’ll ask him about Russian music. I like to collect music from the places I go, and I know diddly squat about the music here. About the only time I hear Russian music is when I’m in the matshrukas, and then there’s virtually no way to tell who’s singing the song.
To be honest, though, all he would really have to do is talk to me. That’s the best kind of practice there is. I’m first and foremost concerned with learning to speak well, and then I’ll get more into the semantics and the grammar later. I’m moderately literate as it is, mostly because I spend all my time in matshrukas squinting out the windows and trying to read things. I’m not very good with writing, though. My spelling is atrocious, and I only have the alphabet half-memorized. (Of course, I know all the letters, just not necessarily in order.)
When he comes over to feed the dogs tomorrow night, we’re going to have our first lesson. We’ll see how it goes.
But, another shift in my lifestyle recently has to do with feeding the dogs. The dogs here are actually extremely well-fed by Kyrgyz standards: twice a day. And not only are they fed often, they actually get their own kind of food, as opposed to straight table slops. There’s a meal they make for the dogs out of gretchka, potatoes, and water, and this is usually ladled on top of some bread and whatever meat bones the family happens to have.
But coming over twice a day to feed the dogs is a lot of work on their part, and they asked if I would be willing to take over the chore. They’d pay for the food, I’d just have to be the one to feed them. I said that I’d be willing to do it in the mornings, because I’ll definitely be home, but because my schedule here is so unpredictable, I don’t know if I’ll be able to do it every night. Now, to be honest, I am home by the nighttime feeding of the dogs more often than not. It’s just that occasionally I’m out later, either on business or just with friends, and I’d feel bad having to worry about the dogs not getting fed.
Of course, the big thing about feeding the dogs was me getting close enough to the beastie dog. It has gotten used to me: it doesn’t bark its head off and strain at its chain anymore when I walk in the yard. However, I’d never actually approached it where it would be in potential striking distance.
The little dog and I have made good friends, though. I like to sit on the couch out back and watch the birds and drink my coffee in the morning. At first, the little dog would keep its distance, but after a couple of days, it started getting closer. Finally, it got within petting distance one day, and I mean, come on, I’m a sap, and gave it scratches. Now, whenever I go to sit on the couch, it pretty much jumps in my lap.
On a side note, I have become very good at pet-talk. You know, “Who’s a good girl? Who’s a good dog? It’s you, it’s you!” I can now do this in Russian. Every day, I get a little closer to the dream, I tell you.
But today I had to go retrieve the food bowl from the beastie’s pen, and so I walked up to its circle of chain. The dog started jumping a little, and I was like, “Look. I’m going to feed you. You can’t bite me.”
So, with a prayer to all the gods I could think of, I stepped in the pen. The beastie didn’t seem interested in more than licking at me, though. Just in case I happened to be a giant loaf of bread. You never know. The little dog helped. Whenever I bent down to the food bowl and the beastie would play-lunge and I would get freaked out, the little one would start barking. Like, “Dude, stop messing around, I want breakfast.”
So, operation feed the dogs was a success. I didn’t get mauled. I did feel a little bad, though, because there was only a heel’s worth of bread leftover from last night, so the bowl was mostly meal. And hot water. (They always pour hot water over the dish before serving it… I guess it makes it easier for the dogs to eat.) Oh well.
Look at me! I haul water, light trash fires, wash laundry by hand, feed dogs, and light the gas furnace! I’m like a little old Russian lady! I should get one of those babushka head scarves. It would be sweet.
I actually did go for the triple-point score and attempt to make my own bread. I bought a stove the other day, managed to haul it back (which was an adventure in and of itself), and got to work happily pounding out some bread dough. I love baking.
Unfortunately, my oven blew up. Yep. I had let the dough rise twice and put it in the preheated oven to bake, and was in the other room getting my Nintendo on, when suddenly there was a giant explosion. I at first thought it might have been the gas, so I leapt out of my bed and sprinted to the kitchen.
…where I promptly slipped on glass shards and took a magnificent fall, reminiscent of my rugby days where getting laid out by a woman twice my size was life’s greatest pleasure and reward. Sigh.
Except for the fact that rugby fields aren’t usually made of linoleum and covered with glass. Usually. So I scratched the fuck out of myself and my oven blew up.
Fortunately, I did not buy the oven from the bazaar. I actually bought it from Beta Stores, because after some price comparison, they were far cheaper there than at the bazaar. Maybe it’s because they explode, but this is just a guess.
I do still have the receipt, though. My program manager is coming over today to check out the house, as she wasn’t able to do so before due to the beastie being on too long of a chain. I’ll ask her about Beta’s return policy. And maybe she’ll help me out there, as I don’t know how to say in Russian, “Dude, your oven blew up all over my kitchen the day after I bought it. There had better either be an exchange or a return involved in this story.”
I figure my chances are better getting a return at a store than at the bazaar. Hopefully. We’ll see.
But, you know what they say. If ever your oven explodes, bake, bake again. Or something like that.
Written Wednesday, December 17, 2008
I really can’t believe it’s already into the latter half of December. Time flies, when you’re eating sheep fat.
They’re already making preparations for the new group of Volunteers to come, which is weird. Now, they’ve actually changed the Pre Service Training date for this country… I came ‘round these parts in July, but the new Volunteers are coming in March. This is being done for a bevy of reasons, but mainly for the problem that the administration is having with the TEFL volunteers. You see, in our second year of service, our COS (close of service) date is technically in September of 2010, but most people go for the one-month early COS date and leave sometime near the middle or end of August.
But the school year here ends in May. Which means that the TEFL volunteers are looking at a whole summer’s worth of no real work with nothing but leaving the country at the end of it. Compounding this problem is the rule that PCVs can’t take annual leave during the first three months or their last three months of service. Now, you can do program travel, which means you can go about the country, but you can’t take annual leave and go anywhere else. Most TEFL volunteers, during their first summer, do a combination of travel and summer camps or do a Habitat for Humanity stint over by the lake, but the second summer is mostly consumed by wrapping up whatever projects are still on the table and getting ready to leave the country to go do your next big thing.
However, this usually doesn’t take a whole three months, and a lot of people get stuck in the country with no work, an inability to travel, and about two months left to do absolutely nothing with. Consequently, a lot of Volunteers early terminate during the last summer, mostly due to boredom and a readiness to get on with things. The other problem is graduate school: some of us have plans on yet more book-learning after this, and if you’re planning on entering graduate school, which starts in September, you’re going to need to be back in America before the last days of August. For some dumb reason, Peace Corps will give people the three-month early COS date if you have a job waiting somewhere, but not for graduate school. Ergo, more ETs.
So they’re moving the PST date to March, which would make the COS date for the new volunteers in May of 2008, the end of the school year. This would also solve the problem of people going to graduate school in September, as three months would be enough time to decompress and get your affairs in order to start studying.
Though, I do see some other problems inherent with this new date, namely that the Trainees would swear in as Volunteers in May… which, for us TEFL, is the end of the school year. So the new kids on the block would be in their villages, knowing nobody, and doing nothing for three months. It’s entirely possible that Peace Corps has some sort of plan to get the new Volunteers involved in camps or something of the ilk, but if they’ve got no plans, I have no idea what they’re thinking. Sure, it was a bit fast to drop straight into teaching classes the weekend after swearing in, but it gave me something to do other than sit at home and stare at the ceiling. Community integration is also bolstered incredibly by work, particularly work at a school: virtually every child between the ages of six and seventeen in this village knows who I am, now. I’ve got a routine (of sorts) and I’m comfortable with it.
To be fair, I guess there’s no real prime time to have people come in. A few years back they actually had people coming to country in, like, November, which drops everybody off in the middle of a frigid Central Asian winter, which probably didn’t do much for the ET rate during PST. In spring, you run up against the end of the school year. Summer, the problems I described above. Middle of winter would just be filled with all kinds of stupid. Kyrgyzstan apparently has the highest ET rate out of all the Central Asian countries and Eastern Europe, so I guess whatever they do to change it can’t make it any worse. (For the curious, I’ve been told that the country with the highest rate period is Jordan, due to the very strict Muslim culture. I’ve actually heard that they’ve had entire groups ET. They’re mostly Muslim here, to be sure, but they also slug vodka straight from the bottle so most people are more casual about it than anything else.)
But, anyway, in the realm of teaching, I’m actually done for the year at the school, all things considered. See, I mostly teach on Thursdays, and because last week was the mysterious Olympiad that I couldn’t attend, there was no class. This week is the term exam, so I don’t do anything but show up and practice the math section of the GRE. (Not that I have any plans on taking that in the very near future, but, uh, I can use all the help I can get when it comes to numbers. It’s… been a while.) Next week the students are going to be taking oral exams, so while I will have to listen and evaluate, no teaching. And then, uh, it’s the end of the year.
Wow.
I don’t really have any concrete plans for my winter break: because my school is heated by coal and not electricity, I only have a month off. And In Service Training, which I have to attend, bisects that month. I had been considering going somewhere for two weeks, but I figure I can save some money and keep myself entertained well enough around these parts, considering my proximity to the capital. Maybe I’ll take in a ballet or a play… or see the circus, if it’s in town. (They actually have a permanent building for the circus, here. Lonely Planet describes the architecture of it as a crash-landed UFO from the 1950s, and I can’t come up with anything more astute than that for it.) I’ll go hang out in the foyer of the Hyatt and pretend I have money. I’m not sure about my classes at the TOEFL center, but if they’re in session, I’ll keep teaching there. Maybe I can pick up a few extra classes in exchange for some more Russian lessons.
This summer, I’ll travel. I’ve heard tickets to Prague are relatively cheap, or maybe Emma will come and visit and we’ll do us some China. I don’t think I’ll be wanting to hit up Thailand or India in July, so I’ll head for somewhat cooler locales.
But for now, winter.
Thursday, December 11, 2008
.listen, children, all is not lost
Written Thursday, December 4, 2008
I measure my life in toothbrushes.
One new toothbrush when I came to country. Another when I left my PST host family in September. And yet another when I move tomorrow into my new digs. Ah, dental hygiene. How you so succinctly number my days.
There was a slight blip in the plan, though, mostly owing to the fact that my landlord hasn’t yet removed the monstrous dog guarding the grounds. She said that her son didn’t come by last Saturday to remove the beastie, and that I should wait to move in until Sunday. However, I was all like, “dude, you told me last week I could move in on Friday, I told everybody else that I was moving in on Friday, and come hell or high water, that’s what I’m going to do.”
And so it is.
On another not-moving, note, my brains are becoming absolutely scrambled by all the languages I’m attempting to pack into them. Sometimes, these days, people will talk to me and I don’t know what language they’re trying to use. Oh, sure, I realize that the Americans I know are generally using English, and most of the host country nationals I interact with are using Russian and virtually nobody speaks to me in Japanese, but it’s just all mooshed together these days.
It’s kind of unnerving, really. I still outburst in Japanese occasionally, or answer in Russian or English when I should be using the opposite. Just today when I was lecturing in my classes in English, I could not, for the life of me, remember the word “pepper.” I was talking, and then a strange look crossed my counterpart’s face when I just busted out with “perez” in the middle of an English sentence. She had to supplement the English word when I completely blanked. And I still have a problem with “choot choot,” which means “a little,” as the Japanese “chotto” is just too similar and goddamnit I can’t keep anything straight anymore.
Even weirder is when somebody speaks to me, and I’m only half-listening, and for a couple of moments, I have no idea what language they’re using. Like, I can’t even identify it. Weirder yet is when I understand what they want, but I just don’t know the words. This has even happened to me on the occasions when my current host family was speaking to me in Kyrgyz (which I don’t know why they do, because everybody here knows I don’t speak that language worth a heap of Talas beans). Somebody will say something to me, in any language, and I’ll know exactly what they want, but not which language they’re wanting it in.
I think a lot of it is due to the simplicity of most communication. Having done the whole “dropped in a country where you don’t speak the language” thing twice now, I’ve found it’s amazing how much you can get accomplished by not speaking, or even just using a couple of incorrectly conjugated words. Oh, sure, it’s like the difference between using surgical instruments to get your point across and just beating something with a rock until you get something like what you wanted, but it’s doable. My first two weeks here the only things I could really say with any regularity were “hello” and “good,” but I got by.
Sometimes, I like to think about how well I could express myself if I lived somewhere where everybody spoke English/Russian/Japanese. I mean, that’s three languages worth of talking. Of course, most things I can say best in English, but there are certain turns of phrase that just work better in either Russian or Japanese. Not to mention, there are enough swear words in Russian to fill a dictionary, so I can express my displeasure so much more fluidly these days. I am no longer limited to “shit,” and “fuck,” and “damn,” but I can now tell somebody to go fuck off and sit on a dick. And I suppose it’s not as though I can’t say that in English, but it’s just so much more… emphatic in the Russian.
Which I suppose is a perk to all of this. Japanese is a beautiful language, but the swearing in it is rather limited. Unless you want to sound like a yakusa (which, I mean, everybody probably does) and speak in straight Osaka-ben, but that’s kind of hard to pull off. I’m just not cool enough for those designer shades.
Oh, life. Five years ago, who would have thought I’d be living in Kyrgyzstan, hopelessly screwing up the Russian language with errant Japanese vocabulary? Let’s hope the adventure never ceases.
Funnily enough, I did have a chance to exercise some Japanese the other day. December fifth was International Volunteer’s Day (I know it’s a huge holiday in the States, so bear with me on this), and we celebrated by doing a little performance at a local orphanage. There were American, Japanese, and Spanish volunteers there. The performance went relatively well, considering that we had done zero planning beforehand. Basically, I ended up leading everybody in the YMCA, which I had to make up on the spot. Oh, sure, the REFRAIN of the song is pretty famous, but, you know, there’s the rest of it, too. There was a lot of jumping. And some Macarena. (The Spaniards actually did present the Macarena, and I was like, dude, that’s Mexican.)
But I managed to get into a conversation with some of the Japanese volunteers. It was probably the most fragmented conversation I’ve ever had the grace to be a part of, considering that we were speaking in an equal mix of Japanese and English with Russian thrown in on my part, and Kyrgyz on the Japanese’s part.
One of my directors was watching the whole exchange with a bemused look on his face. After, he asked, “So, how many languages were you speaking in again?” And I was like, “Four. DON’T MOCK ME BECAUSE I CAN’T HAVE A CONVERSATION IN ONE LANGAGE ANYMORE GEEZ THIS IS YOUR FAULT.” He seemed to think it was hilarious. I, on the other hand, was bemoaning the fact that I can’t speak coherently anymore. Lesson learned: Never Be An Expat.
Though, due to that spectacular mess of a conversation I was invited to come to the Japanese Corner in Bishkek. I’ve never heard of these before, but Kyrgyzstan has a Japanese Corner, and American Corners in nearly all major towns. There are also Russian Corners. They’re like little language centers, full of books and usually computer resources. I’m interested in going to the Japanese Corner because perhaps I might get some Japanese lessons if I smile prettily enough. …maybe even for free, because God knows I can’t afford to pay for anything these days. I could offer English lessons in return, I suppose. That’s an arrangement I have with a language school in Bishkek; they got my number through the previous volunteer that lived in my village. I now teach two hours worth of talk classes a week and help out with TOEFL classes occasionally, and in return I get an hour’s worth of Russian tutoring. This is bomb diggity, because it’s actually a language school where they teach expats Russian, so knowledgeable teachers who know how to deal with dumb Americans will be teaching me. I’d be more than happy to make a similar arrangement at the Japanese Corner.
Though, the funny thing about languages, I’ve discovered, is that they’re rather like amoebas in the way they develop in peoples’ brains. They stretch and grow in jelly-like formation, rather than linearly. Let me explain.
In theory, my Japanese is better than my Russian. However, I’ve come to discover that, in many respects, there are certain things that I can describe quite aptly in Russian that I have no idea how to say in Japanese. Now, this is undoubtedly somewhat due to the fact that I haven’t had to use Japanese in any real sense, other than academic, for at least two years. I didn’t take Japanese language classes my last year at college. However, I’ve just gone through a ridiculously rigorous crash course in Russian for three months, and now I use it every day.
But even beyond that, the ways in which I use Russian are vastly different from the ways I used Japanese, even when I was living in Japan. I can still speak remarkably well about studying, and theses, and World War II in Japanese, which are things that I’m clumsy with in Russian at best. However, I’ve become remarkably quick with numbers in Russian, no doubt to all the foraging I do at the bazaar. Also, my vocabulary in terms of foodstuffs in Russian is vastly superior to my Japanese: when I lived in Japan, I was with a host family who provided all my meals (to great excess, in fact), so most of my food vocabulary is limited to restaurant dishes and snack foods. I have no idea how to say “cinnamon” in Japanese. However, I can basically have a native-level conversation about spices in Russian, because I had to know what the hell I wanted to buy before I asked for it.
It’s just interesting because I never really considered the many angles to which you can “know” a language. Obviously, because I can speak every which way in English, I had always thought to be able to speak a language, well, it meant you can speak broadly, about anything. And I suppose that’s the nature of “fluency,” and I am certainly not fluent in either Japanese or Russian, but if certain topics come up in those languages, I can speak on them with a good amount of precision. Obviously, in all three languages I’m good with talking about myself, my history, what I’m doing/going to at any point in time, the basics.
But when it comes down to slightly out-of-the-ordinary topics, a lot of what I can and can’t say in Russian or Japanese is dictated by my lifestyle at the time. I remember a lot of Japanese being incredibly impressed when I told them I was studying the history of Yasukuni shrine and World War II and how it relates to Japanese and world politics today. I friggin’ had that down to a science.
But if they had tried to talk to me about cinnamon, I probably wouldn’t have been able to do anything but flubber my way through a few sentences. In Russian, I’m all like, “Oh, hells yes, cinnamon. I’m going to bake myself a pie; do you have any baking powder? I need it for the crust.”
“Crust” is another thing I have no idea how to say in Japanese. In Russian it’s “tecsta.” I can, however, say “small electoral district proportional representative parallel system” in Japanese. No joke. It’s “shousenkyoku hireidaihyou heiritsusei.” (For the burningly curious, it’s what Japan’s current voting system is called after the reforms in 1994.) I cannot say this in Russian. I can barely say it in English.
My head: welcome to it.
Written December 6, 2008
Oh sweet, sweet freedom.
So it’s happened. The first time I’ve ever lived alone in non-college-based housing is in Kyrgyzstan. I suppose that’s another mark in the “my life is bizarro” book.
There were some further blips in the plan before it happened, though. Turns out that they locked half the house off to me. The way this place is set up is with a three-season-esque porch in the back, which leads into a hallway area. Four rooms branch off of this hallway: a kitchen, a living room, and two bedrooms. They all have doors, and they locked off the living room and one of the bedrooms. The reasoning behind this is that the mother (woman who actually lives here but is in Russia) would be pissed if she realized there was a stranger in there tromping through all her stuff. I can respect that, but why two rooms? Why not just put everything precious in one room? Sheesh.
When I realized that that’s how shit was going down, I was pissed, because (and I still maintain this) I was never told that the two rooms were going to be closed off. They claim that they did tell me, but if they did it must have been in rapid spitfire Russian.
Once I got over that, though, it’s not so bad. I mean, I’m only one person, so I don’t really need all that much room. And, to be completely honest about it, even with half the house inaccessible, it’s still the most living space I’ve ever had to myself before. In all the other living situations I’ve been in, I only had one room.
I’ve made do, though. Because the two rooms that are closed off are next to each other in the back of the house, I put my large table with the drop leaf in front of them, and I stole a cabinet from the porch area to be a bookshelf. The back of the hallway is now a dining room/work area.
The bedroom has two beds in it, and it turns out one of them is a convertible sofa. Of course, the supports that keep it in sofa position are nonexistent, so I had to go out and find a stool to wedge between the back of the couch and the wall, but goddamn it, it works. I had a second smaller table and a vanity thing in there that I arranged a bit, and a closet that’s mostly full of random old broken radios, but has enough room for my clothes. There was no place to hang clothes, so I removed a shelf from the closet, found some bent nails in the yard, and made a bar by driving some nails into the shelf supports, and putting two more nails into a stick I found. Then, I tied the nails on the stick to the nails in the closet with dental floss. That’s right. I’m the MacGuyver of home decorating. Wben I leave, I can just remove it and replace the shelf.
The extremely nice thing about having a house, though, is inheriting all the things that come with it: namely, cookware. I’m virtually drowning in pots and pans and rolling pins and jars and whatnot. Especially rolling pins: I’ve found seven of them. Why the hell you’d need seven rolling pins is beyond me, but, hey, I don’t hate on the way grandmas roll. (lololololololololo…)
I will have to buy a stove, though. The ranges here work (there’s actually an indoor and an outdoor stove, which is probably more useful during summer than right now), but the stoves don’t. To be honest, I’ve never been in a house here where the stove works. They all use the oversized toaster ovens.
Whatever. I don’t have to buy cookware or utensils, so it won’t be that big of a deal. Peace Corps did give us a settling in allowance, which is plenty to cover a stove. …and a couple of mugs. Not that I don’t dig on the handleless teacups, but sometimes you just need a big heavy mug to wrap your hands around. One of my wiser last-minute purchases back in the States was a travel mug, which has been what I’ve been using almost exclusively since I’ve been here. It’s perfectly fine, but, still, Laura want mug. They’re only like, a dollar apiece anyway.
And I have a rice cooker. That’s right. It’s RICE TIME. And I can cook beans again. Which makes it RICE AND BEAN TIME.
I also appreciate having a yard. There’s an overhang in the back made out of corrugated metal. I like to call it my “lanai.” You know, like they have in Hawaii. Just… more… Kyrgyz.
They’re still trying to get me to keep the huge monster dog. I’m not as freaked out by it as I originally was, but that doesn’t mean I still don’t want it here. (Namely, I’m afraid that if I have some friends over and somebody gets drunk and just decides to go wandering… yeah, could end badly if somebody gets mauled.) The landlord was all like, “Well, if it can’t stay here, where can it go?” And I basically said, “Dude, not my problem. You told me you’d take the dog away if I moved in. If you’ve got no place to put the damn thing, you’d better come up with something.” Of course, my Russian isn’t nearly as good as to come up with something as assholish, so in actuality, I just smiled and shrugged.
I’ve warmed to the little dog, though. It’s not as jumpy or yappy as the ones at my old residence. I do, in theory, know her name, but the problem is that it sounds exactly like “chainik,” meaning “teapot,” which means I can’t remember its actual name.
So I’m just going to call the dog “teapot.” Teapot the dog. Sweet.
But now, instead of a host family, I’ve inherited a landlord family. They’ve been over every day since I’ve been here, mostly to feed the dog and do various repair jobs. Namely, currently, the stove inside doesn’t work. Well, it works, but the rubber tubing connecting the gas to the stove is leaky. I turned it on once and it started hissing at me and then the room smelled like a gas station, so I figured it would be a bad idea to do something like strike a match and attempt to cook.
The son has been the one coming over most often. We had a nice conversation yesterday, which I think finally proved to the family that I actually am not completely hopeless with Russian. It’s just that all the times they were trying to talk to me prior, they were talking about how the gas meter worked and other things that I have absolutely zip vocabulary for. The somewhat downside to this is now that the son kind of knows me, I think he’s worried about me living alone. He came over to light the gas heating today, and even though I was like, “Dude, that’s expensive,” he was like, “But it’s cold and you’ll get sick!”
Oy. One family for another, I suppose. But whenever somebody from the family comes over, they always attempt to turn on the heat, and I’ve found it’s nearly impossible to stop them. Now, basically, I let them turn it on, and whenever they leave, I turn it off again. It seems that they don’t understand that I can’t afford to friggin heat the house all the time. Yes, I know it’s cold in here. However, the rent alone is above and beyond what Peace Corps will pay for housing (which I think is asinine to begin with; the most they’ll give for this area of the country is 2000 som, and it is bonafied IMPOSSIBLE to have an independent living option for so little money here), so paying for heat above it is just not on, particularly because it’s gas heat, which is the most expensive kind there is. Now, for the purposes of winter Peace Corps will give us advance for our living allowances to pay for heating, but the thing is that the money there comes out of my salary for later months, which I need to pay for the friggin’ HOUSE in later months, so it’s more like borrowing from Peter to pay Paul. So, I just wear a coat and sleep with a hot water bottle. It works. Fortunately I’ve always had a relatively high tolerance for cold, much higher than my tolerance for heat.
But the landlady is actually a shopowner. She owns a little store that she runs out of the front of her house. I went there today to buy some bread and chocolate condensed milk (mostly because I had never seen it before… it actually tastes remarkably similar to hot fudge). I think it made her happy, because she was probably thinking I had come to complain about something. It’s more expensive to buy things in the small stores than from the bazaar, but it’s a lot closer to where I live, and, hey, it’s worth the five extra som to make the landlady happy.
If nothing else, my living exploits have made me good connections. My old host family is all about the dairy products, and now I’ve got a dry goods store at my disposal. Good times.
Another thing I’ve been thinking about recently is chickens. There actually is a chicken pen here, and I’ve been rolling around the idea of maybe buying a couple of hens for it. I mean, the egg output alone would be worth it, as I tend to go through quite a few eggs. It would also be useful for my vegetable matter refuse. At my old house, they just fed all things like carrot and onion shavings to the dogs, but here I was told that the dogs don’t really eat that sort of thing, so I’ve taken to just throwing it out in the yard.
Obviously, I’d have to do some research on this first, because I don’t really know much about raising chickens. Furthermore, there would be the issue of what to do with them when I had to move, since the person who lives in this house is due back in about a year. The options would be a) leave them here, if the family is willing to have them, b) take them with me, if I end up somewhere where I can have chickens, or c) eat them. And, uh, I don’t know how much I’m up for killing my own chickens.
If I ever have kids, they’re going to be so messed up. Like, “Mooooom, why do you keep everything in jars? Why can’t we have Tupperware like normal people? And whyyyyy do we have to have chickens? And can’t we get indoor plumbing it’s like 2020-“
And I’ll be all like, “NO IT’S TOO EXPENSIVE STOP BITCHING IT’S TIME FOR THE DAILY FIVE HOUR NO ELECTRICITY TIME AND GO HAUL SOME WATER WE HAVE TO WASH THE LAUNDRY BY HAND AND LIGHT THE TRASH FIRE.”
All of which I did today, by the way.
And then for dinner we’ll have umiboshi onigiri and red miso fish with milk tea and matcha soft cream. Because, mmm, that shit’s the stuff. God, I miss Japanese food. And National Coney Island.
Written December 11, 2008
Working here is a trip sometimes, I tell you.
Today was the rayon-wide Olympiad. Rayons here are kind of like counties, I guess, and Olympiad is kind of like quiz bowl, at least as much as it was explained to me. I was assigned to help the students prepare for it, as well as come up with something for the speaking and listening parts.
For speaking, I came up with fifteen talking topics, that each of the students would choose, have a couple of minutes to prepare for, and give a two-minute speech on. Basically, impromptu, just like the things I used to love the hell out of in speech class. This is actually harder than it would seem to come up with, since you have to think of a topic that is broad enough to talk about for two minutes, is easily understandable, and yet requires no prior knowledge on the part of the speaker. After all, it’s mainly to judge the English abilities of the student, not their knowledge of geography or history or whatever.
Listening, I originally suggested maybe some books on CD, as I burned copies from a bunch of different level books before I came here. However, my counterpart said that it should probably have something to do with the national curriculum on at least a nominal level, so that meant English-speaking countries. No problem, I just wrote little blurbs and was planning on reading them aloud. For America, I wrote about the Civil Rights movement, for England the Beatles, and for Canada a selection about Quebec wanting to succeed. Then, six or seven questions about the content.
Not too difficult, really. Weirdly, though, yesterday the zavouch (assistant principal, kind of) said that they were just going to use the material from last year, and that I didn’t need to go because there would be other volunteers going. (Not Peace Corps Volunteers… there actually is a Volunteer close to where the Olympiad was held, but his grandfather just died, so he’s in the States at the moment for the funeral.) It hadn’t been too much work to come up with the prompts or anything, but I still wanted to go just so I could see what it was like, even if I wasn’t going to be directly involved. I mean, next year I’ll be able to prepare students better if I know exactly what they’re going to be up against, right?
So I went this morning to the school, but the director told me again that I couldn’t go, because there would be other volunteers there and that they would protest if I showed up, apparently even if I just watched. These things are just not worth arguing about, so I went home. I suppose if somebody is thrusting a day off in my face, I’ll take it. Uncle, uncle.
I still think the whole thing is weird, though. If I were organizing something like an Olympiad, and other volunteers showed up, no matter whom they were, I’d be thrilled. Particularly if they were native English speakers: it’s more people to help me out, after all. And even if I had no use for them, I don’t think I’d be in any form bothered by their presence. I’ll just ask my counterpart about it on Monday. Namely, about whom these “volunteers” are and what their beef is. Tomorrow I don’t have class anyway, due to the schedule, and then there’s the weekend, so it gave me a four-day holiday from teaching at the school. I also didn’t do any real teaching this week, as Tuesday I was preparing the listening and speaking sections that didn’t end up getting used, and Thursday is my main day of teaching, and classes were canceled due to the Olympiad.
Whenever I get too frustrated with work, I like to watch The Office. It could always be worse.
In lieu of teaching today, I hopped over to the bazaar and bought about thirty eggs, a half-kilo of green tea, some butter, and some bread.
Thirty eggs is kind of a lot, but that’s how they sell them here in cartons. You can buy any amount of eggs you’d like, of course, but it’s cheaper to buy them in bulk. To be honest, though, I do go through a lot of eggs as it is, considering that they’re a great protein source and cheaper and easier to cook than meat. Also, a lot of the meat here is absolutely riddled with fat and gristle (not marbled like a beautiful cut, we’re talking globs and blobs), which isn’t exactly the way I like my beef pot pie. However, I have been told that if you ask for “black meat,” butchers usually have some on hand: these are the leaner cuts. And supposedly they’re cheaper than the regular stuff, as most Kyrgyz really enjoy eating fat. So, I suppose we’ll see.
Another thing I need to bite the bullet and buy is a stove. Then I will make some pot pie. And bread pudding. And roasted vegetables. And mm.
Today I attempted to make bean burgers, since I already had most of the ingredients on hand, and I wanted to celebrate my regained ability to cook beans. The recipe is fairly straightforward: cook the beans until soft but not mushy, and sauté some onions, carrots, and bell peppers until soft. Mash and mix together with an egg and some breadcrumbs, season with cumin, salt, and black and red pepper. Form patties, and cook on a griddle until done.
Unfortunately I didn’t have enough breadcrumbs on hand, and was too lazy to make more, so the patties were too wet to hold form. I ended up just scrambling it up and eating it with a fork on the plate. Still good.
Had minor landlady issues yesterday. She came over and basically started criticizing the way I had the house set up, insisting that I should put my clothes there or the table here or whatever else. This has happened to me at all three places I’ve lived here, and I have to say it’s equal parts mystifying and annoying. Look, it’s my shit, why do you care what shelf I have it on in the closet? And if I want the table in that corner, what difference does it make? I’m the one that lives here, goddamnit.
She also got upset with me because I didn’t understand half the things she was saying, and then she started yelling at me because of it. This is endlessly frustrating. Russian is a hard language, okay? I only studied it for about three months, have been speaking it for six, and I’m obviously doing the best I can. Maybe if you spoke a little slower or used less difficult vocabulary, I might understand it more. I understand even less when you start yelling, because not only are you speaking faster, I’m wondering how the hell I made you so upset, and still can’t understand what you’re saying.
I suppose a lot of it is being used to dealing with foreigners. Whenever I speak to somebody who knows English as a second language here, I always make sure to enunciate clearly, remove the idioms from my speech, and speak at a slower clip than I normally do. Not because I think people here are stupid, but I know that operating in a second language can be difficult and unless you’ve lived in an English-speaking country for a long period of time, most idioms aren’t going to make any sense. Man, I’ve been there. To be completely honest, I am there.
I also have to re-prove my competence at doing household tasks. The landlady likes to tell me things like, “wash dishes when you’re done with them,” and “make your bed.” I’m like… dude, all the dishes are washed and the bed is made. The hell?
I’ve started using the gas heat, because she said that if I don’t, it could cause damage to the heating system. Fine, fine. Today I had a little adventure in lighting the furnace, though. The son had showed me how to do it – turn on the gas pipe, cover the button on the furnace with the latch, light the end of the metal stick on fire, and stick it so the gas catches. Well, today I did just that, but it turns out the gas was on too high, and it kind of blew fire halfway across the kitchen. It’s all right; I didn’t need those eyebrows.
When the son came over the feed the dogs, he offered to light the furnace for me, and when I told him I had already done it he got a mild look of panic in his eyes, but he came and checked it out and said everything was fine. Boo-yah. …I’m just glad he wasn’t there when I actually lit it, but I’ll get better with practice. Hopefully. Maybe I’ll just get crispier with practice.
Thank God I have a sense of humor, I guess. It’s been the most useful thing I’ve brought. Well, that or the duct tape.
I measure my life in toothbrushes.
One new toothbrush when I came to country. Another when I left my PST host family in September. And yet another when I move tomorrow into my new digs. Ah, dental hygiene. How you so succinctly number my days.
There was a slight blip in the plan, though, mostly owing to the fact that my landlord hasn’t yet removed the monstrous dog guarding the grounds. She said that her son didn’t come by last Saturday to remove the beastie, and that I should wait to move in until Sunday. However, I was all like, “dude, you told me last week I could move in on Friday, I told everybody else that I was moving in on Friday, and come hell or high water, that’s what I’m going to do.”
And so it is.
On another not-moving, note, my brains are becoming absolutely scrambled by all the languages I’m attempting to pack into them. Sometimes, these days, people will talk to me and I don’t know what language they’re trying to use. Oh, sure, I realize that the Americans I know are generally using English, and most of the host country nationals I interact with are using Russian and virtually nobody speaks to me in Japanese, but it’s just all mooshed together these days.
It’s kind of unnerving, really. I still outburst in Japanese occasionally, or answer in Russian or English when I should be using the opposite. Just today when I was lecturing in my classes in English, I could not, for the life of me, remember the word “pepper.” I was talking, and then a strange look crossed my counterpart’s face when I just busted out with “perez” in the middle of an English sentence. She had to supplement the English word when I completely blanked. And I still have a problem with “choot choot,” which means “a little,” as the Japanese “chotto” is just too similar and goddamnit I can’t keep anything straight anymore.
Even weirder is when somebody speaks to me, and I’m only half-listening, and for a couple of moments, I have no idea what language they’re using. Like, I can’t even identify it. Weirder yet is when I understand what they want, but I just don’t know the words. This has even happened to me on the occasions when my current host family was speaking to me in Kyrgyz (which I don’t know why they do, because everybody here knows I don’t speak that language worth a heap of Talas beans). Somebody will say something to me, in any language, and I’ll know exactly what they want, but not which language they’re wanting it in.
I think a lot of it is due to the simplicity of most communication. Having done the whole “dropped in a country where you don’t speak the language” thing twice now, I’ve found it’s amazing how much you can get accomplished by not speaking, or even just using a couple of incorrectly conjugated words. Oh, sure, it’s like the difference between using surgical instruments to get your point across and just beating something with a rock until you get something like what you wanted, but it’s doable. My first two weeks here the only things I could really say with any regularity were “hello” and “good,” but I got by.
Sometimes, I like to think about how well I could express myself if I lived somewhere where everybody spoke English/Russian/Japanese. I mean, that’s three languages worth of talking. Of course, most things I can say best in English, but there are certain turns of phrase that just work better in either Russian or Japanese. Not to mention, there are enough swear words in Russian to fill a dictionary, so I can express my displeasure so much more fluidly these days. I am no longer limited to “shit,” and “fuck,” and “damn,” but I can now tell somebody to go fuck off and sit on a dick. And I suppose it’s not as though I can’t say that in English, but it’s just so much more… emphatic in the Russian.
Which I suppose is a perk to all of this. Japanese is a beautiful language, but the swearing in it is rather limited. Unless you want to sound like a yakusa (which, I mean, everybody probably does) and speak in straight Osaka-ben, but that’s kind of hard to pull off. I’m just not cool enough for those designer shades.
Oh, life. Five years ago, who would have thought I’d be living in Kyrgyzstan, hopelessly screwing up the Russian language with errant Japanese vocabulary? Let’s hope the adventure never ceases.
Funnily enough, I did have a chance to exercise some Japanese the other day. December fifth was International Volunteer’s Day (I know it’s a huge holiday in the States, so bear with me on this), and we celebrated by doing a little performance at a local orphanage. There were American, Japanese, and Spanish volunteers there. The performance went relatively well, considering that we had done zero planning beforehand. Basically, I ended up leading everybody in the YMCA, which I had to make up on the spot. Oh, sure, the REFRAIN of the song is pretty famous, but, you know, there’s the rest of it, too. There was a lot of jumping. And some Macarena. (The Spaniards actually did present the Macarena, and I was like, dude, that’s Mexican.)
But I managed to get into a conversation with some of the Japanese volunteers. It was probably the most fragmented conversation I’ve ever had the grace to be a part of, considering that we were speaking in an equal mix of Japanese and English with Russian thrown in on my part, and Kyrgyz on the Japanese’s part.
One of my directors was watching the whole exchange with a bemused look on his face. After, he asked, “So, how many languages were you speaking in again?” And I was like, “Four. DON’T MOCK ME BECAUSE I CAN’T HAVE A CONVERSATION IN ONE LANGAGE ANYMORE GEEZ THIS IS YOUR FAULT.” He seemed to think it was hilarious. I, on the other hand, was bemoaning the fact that I can’t speak coherently anymore. Lesson learned: Never Be An Expat.
Though, due to that spectacular mess of a conversation I was invited to come to the Japanese Corner in Bishkek. I’ve never heard of these before, but Kyrgyzstan has a Japanese Corner, and American Corners in nearly all major towns. There are also Russian Corners. They’re like little language centers, full of books and usually computer resources. I’m interested in going to the Japanese Corner because perhaps I might get some Japanese lessons if I smile prettily enough. …maybe even for free, because God knows I can’t afford to pay for anything these days. I could offer English lessons in return, I suppose. That’s an arrangement I have with a language school in Bishkek; they got my number through the previous volunteer that lived in my village. I now teach two hours worth of talk classes a week and help out with TOEFL classes occasionally, and in return I get an hour’s worth of Russian tutoring. This is bomb diggity, because it’s actually a language school where they teach expats Russian, so knowledgeable teachers who know how to deal with dumb Americans will be teaching me. I’d be more than happy to make a similar arrangement at the Japanese Corner.
Though, the funny thing about languages, I’ve discovered, is that they’re rather like amoebas in the way they develop in peoples’ brains. They stretch and grow in jelly-like formation, rather than linearly. Let me explain.
In theory, my Japanese is better than my Russian. However, I’ve come to discover that, in many respects, there are certain things that I can describe quite aptly in Russian that I have no idea how to say in Japanese. Now, this is undoubtedly somewhat due to the fact that I haven’t had to use Japanese in any real sense, other than academic, for at least two years. I didn’t take Japanese language classes my last year at college. However, I’ve just gone through a ridiculously rigorous crash course in Russian for three months, and now I use it every day.
But even beyond that, the ways in which I use Russian are vastly different from the ways I used Japanese, even when I was living in Japan. I can still speak remarkably well about studying, and theses, and World War II in Japanese, which are things that I’m clumsy with in Russian at best. However, I’ve become remarkably quick with numbers in Russian, no doubt to all the foraging I do at the bazaar. Also, my vocabulary in terms of foodstuffs in Russian is vastly superior to my Japanese: when I lived in Japan, I was with a host family who provided all my meals (to great excess, in fact), so most of my food vocabulary is limited to restaurant dishes and snack foods. I have no idea how to say “cinnamon” in Japanese. However, I can basically have a native-level conversation about spices in Russian, because I had to know what the hell I wanted to buy before I asked for it.
It’s just interesting because I never really considered the many angles to which you can “know” a language. Obviously, because I can speak every which way in English, I had always thought to be able to speak a language, well, it meant you can speak broadly, about anything. And I suppose that’s the nature of “fluency,” and I am certainly not fluent in either Japanese or Russian, but if certain topics come up in those languages, I can speak on them with a good amount of precision. Obviously, in all three languages I’m good with talking about myself, my history, what I’m doing/going to at any point in time, the basics.
But when it comes down to slightly out-of-the-ordinary topics, a lot of what I can and can’t say in Russian or Japanese is dictated by my lifestyle at the time. I remember a lot of Japanese being incredibly impressed when I told them I was studying the history of Yasukuni shrine and World War II and how it relates to Japanese and world politics today. I friggin’ had that down to a science.
But if they had tried to talk to me about cinnamon, I probably wouldn’t have been able to do anything but flubber my way through a few sentences. In Russian, I’m all like, “Oh, hells yes, cinnamon. I’m going to bake myself a pie; do you have any baking powder? I need it for the crust.”
“Crust” is another thing I have no idea how to say in Japanese. In Russian it’s “tecsta.” I can, however, say “small electoral district proportional representative parallel system” in Japanese. No joke. It’s “shousenkyoku hireidaihyou heiritsusei.” (For the burningly curious, it’s what Japan’s current voting system is called after the reforms in 1994.) I cannot say this in Russian. I can barely say it in English.
My head: welcome to it.
Written December 6, 2008
Oh sweet, sweet freedom.
So it’s happened. The first time I’ve ever lived alone in non-college-based housing is in Kyrgyzstan. I suppose that’s another mark in the “my life is bizarro” book.
There were some further blips in the plan before it happened, though. Turns out that they locked half the house off to me. The way this place is set up is with a three-season-esque porch in the back, which leads into a hallway area. Four rooms branch off of this hallway: a kitchen, a living room, and two bedrooms. They all have doors, and they locked off the living room and one of the bedrooms. The reasoning behind this is that the mother (woman who actually lives here but is in Russia) would be pissed if she realized there was a stranger in there tromping through all her stuff. I can respect that, but why two rooms? Why not just put everything precious in one room? Sheesh.
When I realized that that’s how shit was going down, I was pissed, because (and I still maintain this) I was never told that the two rooms were going to be closed off. They claim that they did tell me, but if they did it must have been in rapid spitfire Russian.
Once I got over that, though, it’s not so bad. I mean, I’m only one person, so I don’t really need all that much room. And, to be completely honest about it, even with half the house inaccessible, it’s still the most living space I’ve ever had to myself before. In all the other living situations I’ve been in, I only had one room.
I’ve made do, though. Because the two rooms that are closed off are next to each other in the back of the house, I put my large table with the drop leaf in front of them, and I stole a cabinet from the porch area to be a bookshelf. The back of the hallway is now a dining room/work area.
The bedroom has two beds in it, and it turns out one of them is a convertible sofa. Of course, the supports that keep it in sofa position are nonexistent, so I had to go out and find a stool to wedge between the back of the couch and the wall, but goddamn it, it works. I had a second smaller table and a vanity thing in there that I arranged a bit, and a closet that’s mostly full of random old broken radios, but has enough room for my clothes. There was no place to hang clothes, so I removed a shelf from the closet, found some bent nails in the yard, and made a bar by driving some nails into the shelf supports, and putting two more nails into a stick I found. Then, I tied the nails on the stick to the nails in the closet with dental floss. That’s right. I’m the MacGuyver of home decorating. Wben I leave, I can just remove it and replace the shelf.
The extremely nice thing about having a house, though, is inheriting all the things that come with it: namely, cookware. I’m virtually drowning in pots and pans and rolling pins and jars and whatnot. Especially rolling pins: I’ve found seven of them. Why the hell you’d need seven rolling pins is beyond me, but, hey, I don’t hate on the way grandmas roll. (lololololololololo…)
I will have to buy a stove, though. The ranges here work (there’s actually an indoor and an outdoor stove, which is probably more useful during summer than right now), but the stoves don’t. To be honest, I’ve never been in a house here where the stove works. They all use the oversized toaster ovens.
Whatever. I don’t have to buy cookware or utensils, so it won’t be that big of a deal. Peace Corps did give us a settling in allowance, which is plenty to cover a stove. …and a couple of mugs. Not that I don’t dig on the handleless teacups, but sometimes you just need a big heavy mug to wrap your hands around. One of my wiser last-minute purchases back in the States was a travel mug, which has been what I’ve been using almost exclusively since I’ve been here. It’s perfectly fine, but, still, Laura want mug. They’re only like, a dollar apiece anyway.
And I have a rice cooker. That’s right. It’s RICE TIME. And I can cook beans again. Which makes it RICE AND BEAN TIME.
I also appreciate having a yard. There’s an overhang in the back made out of corrugated metal. I like to call it my “lanai.” You know, like they have in Hawaii. Just… more… Kyrgyz.
They’re still trying to get me to keep the huge monster dog. I’m not as freaked out by it as I originally was, but that doesn’t mean I still don’t want it here. (Namely, I’m afraid that if I have some friends over and somebody gets drunk and just decides to go wandering… yeah, could end badly if somebody gets mauled.) The landlord was all like, “Well, if it can’t stay here, where can it go?” And I basically said, “Dude, not my problem. You told me you’d take the dog away if I moved in. If you’ve got no place to put the damn thing, you’d better come up with something.” Of course, my Russian isn’t nearly as good as to come up with something as assholish, so in actuality, I just smiled and shrugged.
I’ve warmed to the little dog, though. It’s not as jumpy or yappy as the ones at my old residence. I do, in theory, know her name, but the problem is that it sounds exactly like “chainik,” meaning “teapot,” which means I can’t remember its actual name.
So I’m just going to call the dog “teapot.” Teapot the dog. Sweet.
But now, instead of a host family, I’ve inherited a landlord family. They’ve been over every day since I’ve been here, mostly to feed the dog and do various repair jobs. Namely, currently, the stove inside doesn’t work. Well, it works, but the rubber tubing connecting the gas to the stove is leaky. I turned it on once and it started hissing at me and then the room smelled like a gas station, so I figured it would be a bad idea to do something like strike a match and attempt to cook.
The son has been the one coming over most often. We had a nice conversation yesterday, which I think finally proved to the family that I actually am not completely hopeless with Russian. It’s just that all the times they were trying to talk to me prior, they were talking about how the gas meter worked and other things that I have absolutely zip vocabulary for. The somewhat downside to this is now that the son kind of knows me, I think he’s worried about me living alone. He came over to light the gas heating today, and even though I was like, “Dude, that’s expensive,” he was like, “But it’s cold and you’ll get sick!”
Oy. One family for another, I suppose. But whenever somebody from the family comes over, they always attempt to turn on the heat, and I’ve found it’s nearly impossible to stop them. Now, basically, I let them turn it on, and whenever they leave, I turn it off again. It seems that they don’t understand that I can’t afford to friggin heat the house all the time. Yes, I know it’s cold in here. However, the rent alone is above and beyond what Peace Corps will pay for housing (which I think is asinine to begin with; the most they’ll give for this area of the country is 2000 som, and it is bonafied IMPOSSIBLE to have an independent living option for so little money here), so paying for heat above it is just not on, particularly because it’s gas heat, which is the most expensive kind there is. Now, for the purposes of winter Peace Corps will give us advance for our living allowances to pay for heating, but the thing is that the money there comes out of my salary for later months, which I need to pay for the friggin’ HOUSE in later months, so it’s more like borrowing from Peter to pay Paul. So, I just wear a coat and sleep with a hot water bottle. It works. Fortunately I’ve always had a relatively high tolerance for cold, much higher than my tolerance for heat.
But the landlady is actually a shopowner. She owns a little store that she runs out of the front of her house. I went there today to buy some bread and chocolate condensed milk (mostly because I had never seen it before… it actually tastes remarkably similar to hot fudge). I think it made her happy, because she was probably thinking I had come to complain about something. It’s more expensive to buy things in the small stores than from the bazaar, but it’s a lot closer to where I live, and, hey, it’s worth the five extra som to make the landlady happy.
If nothing else, my living exploits have made me good connections. My old host family is all about the dairy products, and now I’ve got a dry goods store at my disposal. Good times.
Another thing I’ve been thinking about recently is chickens. There actually is a chicken pen here, and I’ve been rolling around the idea of maybe buying a couple of hens for it. I mean, the egg output alone would be worth it, as I tend to go through quite a few eggs. It would also be useful for my vegetable matter refuse. At my old house, they just fed all things like carrot and onion shavings to the dogs, but here I was told that the dogs don’t really eat that sort of thing, so I’ve taken to just throwing it out in the yard.
Obviously, I’d have to do some research on this first, because I don’t really know much about raising chickens. Furthermore, there would be the issue of what to do with them when I had to move, since the person who lives in this house is due back in about a year. The options would be a) leave them here, if the family is willing to have them, b) take them with me, if I end up somewhere where I can have chickens, or c) eat them. And, uh, I don’t know how much I’m up for killing my own chickens.
If I ever have kids, they’re going to be so messed up. Like, “Mooooom, why do you keep everything in jars? Why can’t we have Tupperware like normal people? And whyyyyy do we have to have chickens? And can’t we get indoor plumbing it’s like 2020-“
And I’ll be all like, “NO IT’S TOO EXPENSIVE STOP BITCHING IT’S TIME FOR THE DAILY FIVE HOUR NO ELECTRICITY TIME AND GO HAUL SOME WATER WE HAVE TO WASH THE LAUNDRY BY HAND AND LIGHT THE TRASH FIRE.”
All of which I did today, by the way.
And then for dinner we’ll have umiboshi onigiri and red miso fish with milk tea and matcha soft cream. Because, mmm, that shit’s the stuff. God, I miss Japanese food. And National Coney Island.
Written December 11, 2008
Working here is a trip sometimes, I tell you.
Today was the rayon-wide Olympiad. Rayons here are kind of like counties, I guess, and Olympiad is kind of like quiz bowl, at least as much as it was explained to me. I was assigned to help the students prepare for it, as well as come up with something for the speaking and listening parts.
For speaking, I came up with fifteen talking topics, that each of the students would choose, have a couple of minutes to prepare for, and give a two-minute speech on. Basically, impromptu, just like the things I used to love the hell out of in speech class. This is actually harder than it would seem to come up with, since you have to think of a topic that is broad enough to talk about for two minutes, is easily understandable, and yet requires no prior knowledge on the part of the speaker. After all, it’s mainly to judge the English abilities of the student, not their knowledge of geography or history or whatever.
Listening, I originally suggested maybe some books on CD, as I burned copies from a bunch of different level books before I came here. However, my counterpart said that it should probably have something to do with the national curriculum on at least a nominal level, so that meant English-speaking countries. No problem, I just wrote little blurbs and was planning on reading them aloud. For America, I wrote about the Civil Rights movement, for England the Beatles, and for Canada a selection about Quebec wanting to succeed. Then, six or seven questions about the content.
Not too difficult, really. Weirdly, though, yesterday the zavouch (assistant principal, kind of) said that they were just going to use the material from last year, and that I didn’t need to go because there would be other volunteers going. (Not Peace Corps Volunteers… there actually is a Volunteer close to where the Olympiad was held, but his grandfather just died, so he’s in the States at the moment for the funeral.) It hadn’t been too much work to come up with the prompts or anything, but I still wanted to go just so I could see what it was like, even if I wasn’t going to be directly involved. I mean, next year I’ll be able to prepare students better if I know exactly what they’re going to be up against, right?
So I went this morning to the school, but the director told me again that I couldn’t go, because there would be other volunteers there and that they would protest if I showed up, apparently even if I just watched. These things are just not worth arguing about, so I went home. I suppose if somebody is thrusting a day off in my face, I’ll take it. Uncle, uncle.
I still think the whole thing is weird, though. If I were organizing something like an Olympiad, and other volunteers showed up, no matter whom they were, I’d be thrilled. Particularly if they were native English speakers: it’s more people to help me out, after all. And even if I had no use for them, I don’t think I’d be in any form bothered by their presence. I’ll just ask my counterpart about it on Monday. Namely, about whom these “volunteers” are and what their beef is. Tomorrow I don’t have class anyway, due to the schedule, and then there’s the weekend, so it gave me a four-day holiday from teaching at the school. I also didn’t do any real teaching this week, as Tuesday I was preparing the listening and speaking sections that didn’t end up getting used, and Thursday is my main day of teaching, and classes were canceled due to the Olympiad.
Whenever I get too frustrated with work, I like to watch The Office. It could always be worse.
In lieu of teaching today, I hopped over to the bazaar and bought about thirty eggs, a half-kilo of green tea, some butter, and some bread.
Thirty eggs is kind of a lot, but that’s how they sell them here in cartons. You can buy any amount of eggs you’d like, of course, but it’s cheaper to buy them in bulk. To be honest, though, I do go through a lot of eggs as it is, considering that they’re a great protein source and cheaper and easier to cook than meat. Also, a lot of the meat here is absolutely riddled with fat and gristle (not marbled like a beautiful cut, we’re talking globs and blobs), which isn’t exactly the way I like my beef pot pie. However, I have been told that if you ask for “black meat,” butchers usually have some on hand: these are the leaner cuts. And supposedly they’re cheaper than the regular stuff, as most Kyrgyz really enjoy eating fat. So, I suppose we’ll see.
Another thing I need to bite the bullet and buy is a stove. Then I will make some pot pie. And bread pudding. And roasted vegetables. And mm.
Today I attempted to make bean burgers, since I already had most of the ingredients on hand, and I wanted to celebrate my regained ability to cook beans. The recipe is fairly straightforward: cook the beans until soft but not mushy, and sauté some onions, carrots, and bell peppers until soft. Mash and mix together with an egg and some breadcrumbs, season with cumin, salt, and black and red pepper. Form patties, and cook on a griddle until done.
Unfortunately I didn’t have enough breadcrumbs on hand, and was too lazy to make more, so the patties were too wet to hold form. I ended up just scrambling it up and eating it with a fork on the plate. Still good.
Had minor landlady issues yesterday. She came over and basically started criticizing the way I had the house set up, insisting that I should put my clothes there or the table here or whatever else. This has happened to me at all three places I’ve lived here, and I have to say it’s equal parts mystifying and annoying. Look, it’s my shit, why do you care what shelf I have it on in the closet? And if I want the table in that corner, what difference does it make? I’m the one that lives here, goddamnit.
She also got upset with me because I didn’t understand half the things she was saying, and then she started yelling at me because of it. This is endlessly frustrating. Russian is a hard language, okay? I only studied it for about three months, have been speaking it for six, and I’m obviously doing the best I can. Maybe if you spoke a little slower or used less difficult vocabulary, I might understand it more. I understand even less when you start yelling, because not only are you speaking faster, I’m wondering how the hell I made you so upset, and still can’t understand what you’re saying.
I suppose a lot of it is being used to dealing with foreigners. Whenever I speak to somebody who knows English as a second language here, I always make sure to enunciate clearly, remove the idioms from my speech, and speak at a slower clip than I normally do. Not because I think people here are stupid, but I know that operating in a second language can be difficult and unless you’ve lived in an English-speaking country for a long period of time, most idioms aren’t going to make any sense. Man, I’ve been there. To be completely honest, I am there.
I also have to re-prove my competence at doing household tasks. The landlady likes to tell me things like, “wash dishes when you’re done with them,” and “make your bed.” I’m like… dude, all the dishes are washed and the bed is made. The hell?
I’ve started using the gas heat, because she said that if I don’t, it could cause damage to the heating system. Fine, fine. Today I had a little adventure in lighting the furnace, though. The son had showed me how to do it – turn on the gas pipe, cover the button on the furnace with the latch, light the end of the metal stick on fire, and stick it so the gas catches. Well, today I did just that, but it turns out the gas was on too high, and it kind of blew fire halfway across the kitchen. It’s all right; I didn’t need those eyebrows.
When the son came over the feed the dogs, he offered to light the furnace for me, and when I told him I had already done it he got a mild look of panic in his eyes, but he came and checked it out and said everything was fine. Boo-yah. …I’m just glad he wasn’t there when I actually lit it, but I’ll get better with practice. Hopefully. Maybe I’ll just get crispier with practice.
Thank God I have a sense of humor, I guess. It’s been the most useful thing I’ve brought. Well, that or the duct tape.
Friday, November 28, 2008
.it's no better to be safe than sorry
Written Tuesday, November 25, 2008
I almost killed my host sister today. Over butter.
Thanksgiving is this Thursday, but since us Volunteers don’t get the day off (it’s not exactly a Kyrgyz holiday), we’re postponing the celebration for Saturday. All the Chui Volunteers are getting together in Bishkek, renting an apartment, and eating ourselves stupid. It’s a potluck, but we’re also going out and buying some of the rotisserie chickens they sell on the street in lieu of cooking a turkey. Cooking a turkey would be ridiculously difficult here, given that most of us who have access to ovens are constrained by the fact that ovens here are essentially oversized toaster ovens, which would be difficult to fit a twelve-pound bird in. That, and we’d probably have to buy a live turkey, which would be a little more adventurous than most of us (myself included) are willing to get.
But anyway, for my part in the potluck, I’m making pies. One apple, one pumpkin. This’ll be exciting, because it’s the first year I’ve ever attempted making pumpkin pie on my lonesome, and also the first time I’ve ever had to start with the actual pumpkin. They don’t really have “pie filling” here. Whatever, I’ll give it a whirl. As long as it comes out reasonably edible, everybody’ll be happy.
But in preparation for such an undertaking as pie, one has to be ready to make some pie crusts. Now, making pie crust is actually one of the easier cooking endeavors to embark upon, considering that a pie crust is essentially flour and butter and an egg mashed together. My host mother sells butter, but as it’s homemade, it’s usually served out of a teacup. I figured that a block of butter would be easier to “measure” with. (When I cook, I don’t actually measure anything. There are no such things as measuring cups here.)
But, anyway, yesterday I went on a shopping adventure for pie. I got some pumpkin and, condensed milk for the pumpkin pie, and apples and lemon for the apple pie. I’ve already been well stocked with cinnamon at home, and I also have supplies of sugar, baking soda, cloves, salt, and eggs. Happy and ready to go on a cooking adventure, I brought everything home.
As one would expect, I put the butter in the refrigerator. Now, I admit that the following row was partially my fault, as I didn’t alert the family to the fact that I had put butter in the refrigerator, and it was not to be eaten. In my defense, though, the family never buys butter, as the host mother makes it. I figured that on that merit alone, my butter was safe.
I have had problems with putting things in the refrigerator in the past. For dry-store items, the family has provided me with a special shelf in the china hutch, so I’ve never had issues there. But occasionally, when I bought eggs, I would poke in the refrigerator for some, and find none left, because they had been used.
Today, I go to school, you know, whatever, and come back. I opened the refrigerator to get some fixings for lunch, and… a huge corner of the block of butter I had bought had been hacked away. I opened the jar of natural peanut butter I had, and there was a noticeable dent made in it, as well.
I may as well mention that my host family (primarily the younger sister, and to a lesser extent the mother) have been driving me up the wall in the past few weeks. If I wear the wrong pair of slippers into the kitchen, it’s dirty. If I use the wrong bowl for washing dishes or clothes, it’s dirty. If I put my sweatshirt in the wrong place, it’s dirty. The younger host sister just will not leave me alone, and the constant assaults on my locked door continue. The frustrations with finding a new place to live and being stonewalled hadn’t helped.
On that note, there’s a small block of apartments, right next to the school. There can’t be more than ten units in it; I figured it was nearly a waste of time to ask about it, but I did anyway. Turns out, my director (principal, basically) owns one of the apartments, and there’s nobody living in it currently. But my counterpart said that she had asked about the apartment and the director had said no. Mystified, I had went to the Peace Corps office and asked about it… turns out the major reason that the director doesn’t want to rent the apartment to me is because the director has a beef with my counterpart. Yep. Here I am, basically homeless in a couple of weeks, and the director won’t rent her empty apartment to me because of my counterpart. Make sense? That’s Kyrgyzstan, sometimes.
So when I picked up the mangled block of butter, the gold wrapper peeled away where the thief had gouged out the corner, I was livid. I mean, like, swirling red spots and instant blood-pressure-spike infuriated.
The only other person at home at the time was the younger sister, and she was obviously the culprit, as the parents hadn’t been at home all day, and neither had the older sister. I called out her name, and she ran and hid. I don’t know, maybe the near-visible waves of blazing fury radiating from my persona tipped her off.
I slammed my way out of the house, cursed my way across town in a matshruka, and pretty much plowed through the throng of people blocking my way to the Peace Corps center. Literally. A guy holding a box ran into me and bounced off.
I was all but ready to descend on my program manager’s office in a storm of hellfire and sulfur, but she was at lunch. This was probably a good thing, as I likely would have yelled fit to bust the windows. For better or worse, I’ve been blessed with a loud voice even when I’m chatting, but if I'm pissed, they’ll hear me in Uzbekistan.
Went around to the Volunteer’s center, where the other people there helped me take the nonproductive edge off my anger. I went back to the program manager’s office to find her still not there, so I set about lurking.
The head program coordinator (my program manager’s boss, basically) saw me skulking, and asked what was up. I gave him an earful.
And, frankly, I know that it’s stupid to get so ridiculously upset over butter, I mean, Christ. I’m not normally the type to fly off the handle as such, but it’s just been a building result of pressure these past couple of weeks. I’m just not comfortable where I live, at all, and it’s starting to affect other areas of my life. I mean, in my last year of college, I went to school full-time, worked part-time, played a sport that took up six days a week, administratively ran said sport, and wrote a thesis. I was extremely stressed at times, and I was always busy, but I was never as… well, angry about things as I am now. I am sure that, even at my most stressed out last year, if somebody had taken some butter from me, I would not have gone off on a murderous rampage.
And I’ve been thinking about that recently, that if that’s going to be the person I’m becoming – somebody who can’t handle a little butter theft – then I shouldn’t be here. Not that I’m seriously considering throwing in the towel at the moment, but where I am right now is obviously not healthy or productive. Things need to change, and they don’t need to be changed in a couple of weeks, they need to be changed now.
So, I told him as such, and my program manager came up the hall, and I repeated it all to her.
The threat of ET (early termination) is always effective. I don’t think it’s something that should be made lightly, of course, but basically, I said that if I don’t get a new place to live where I can be comfortable and happy, I’m not going to stick around to the detriment of my mental health. But after I got finished talking with my program director, I got overwhelmed with a bout of tears, and unfortunately didn’t make it out of the office without becoming too obvious about it.
This attracted the attention of the Country Director (everybody’s boss), and she came out and sat with me while I tried to gain control over what remained of my marbles. She, the head program coordinator, and my program manager all had a meeting, because I was clearly a mess, to the point where even the government had to stand up and take notice.
So, there are a couple of housing options on the table: my counterpart asked a fruit seller in town (who apparently knows everybody) about possible housing options, and it turns out she has a mother who lives by herself. They’ve wanted somebody else to live there for a while. This would likely afford me more space and privacy than I have now, but I admit I’m still not entirely thrilled about it: call me slightly jaded, but I kind of just don’t want to deal with host families anymore, even if the family is only one person.
The other possible option is a house. My counterpart’s friend is moving to Russia soon, and her husband is already there. I could live in the house while they were gone, which is good for me, because, hell, I’ll have a house to myself, and also good for them, as I’d keep the house in order while they were gone. The one cravat is that they’d also be trying to sell the house at the same time, so there’s the chance that it’d get sold while I was living there, and then I’d be out of a place to live again.
Tomorrow, I’m going to go see at least the first option, to see what it’s like. The homestay period has also been cut for me: my program manager said I can move out of my current living situation as soon as possible, as opposed to waiting until December 18, which is when the three-month mandatory homestay period is over.
My program manager also asked if I’d like her to talk to my family about the stolen butter, but I was deflated by that time and just said it probably wasn’t worth it. I just wanted to move.
The day did get better, though: some other volunteer friends and I went out to Beta Stores, the Western supermarket, and I bought two pie plates and another container of peanut butter, to replace my stores that “mysteriously” disappeared.
I was happy about the pie plates, though. As Western-style pie isn’t exactly a common article to be cooked around here (they do have pirogh, which are actually kind of like pirogies – wonder where they got their name – where the filling is put into a circle of dough and then folded over like a Hot Pocket), my host family didn’t have any pans I could borrow, and I was worried that they’d be expensive as an import item. I had been planning on splurging on one for the pumpkin pie, and then just making the apple pie into a tart, by rolling out the dough, piling the filling in the center, and just folding the edges over it and baking it flat on a cookie sheet. But they had cheap non-stick pie plates for a little over a dollar apiece, which is affordable, even on my current budget.
So, happily, I get to make an actual apple pie, with a lattice crust topping. I went home, considerably happier than when I went out.
When I got home, I went through the confrontation about the butter. Though, I do have to wonder if my program manager went ahead and called them anyway, despite me telling her not to do so: the host family had bought a small tub of butter, and my host mother offered it to me, saying that, “When children want to eat, they eat,” in excuse for the younger host sister.
Whatever. I wasn’t in the mood to make a scene about it anymore.
Cooking is therapeutic. I went through and made three piecrusts, and it was satisfying to crumble the butter with the flour, and then punch it into dough with the egg. (Or, maybe just punching things is therapeutic.) I now have three nice rounds of pie dough chilling in the refrigerator, one for the pumpkin, two for the double-crust apple.
And I hope like hell I’ll be out of this house within the week. That’ll be something to have a real thanksgiving for.
Written Wednesday, November 26, 2008
I may actually have a serious option.
Today I went to see the fruit-seller’s house. I wasn’t particularly thrilled about it, because I had been told I would have to live with the fruit seller’s mother, and I didn’t know how I would feel about that. However, it was an option, it was ready for me to see it, and I’m not in much of a position to be too picky.
So, after class, my counterpart, my program manager, and I went over to collect the fruit seller, and then see the house.
My initial impressions weren’t too great, especially because we had to wait outside the premises for about five minutes while the fruit seller went in and wrangled with the absolutely enormous feral dog living there. It was chained up, but basically right next to the walk, so it wouldn’t have been difficult for the thing to just lunge across the walkway and take a chunk out of somebody. Eventually the fruit seller poked her head out and said that only one of us could come in to see the house, because that’s how long she could hold back the dog for.
Dubious, I was the one who went in, as it would be me living there. I pushed back the gate, and ran past the chained behemoth, who was distracted by the fruit-seller tossing hunks of bread into its enormous jaws.
The house itself is a definite step down, luxury-wise, from the one I’m in right now. It’s a lot smaller: there’s a three-season porch-esque room, a bedroom, a living room with a bed in it, and a kitchen. There is no running water inside, but there is a spigot in the yard, and a gravity sink in the kitchen. (A gravity sink looks kind of like a small china hutch. There’s a tank on the top, which you fill from a bucket, which is attached to a spigot. The water from the spigot runs into a basin, which empties into a second bucket. The second bucket you have to manually dump outside.) The outside has a small plot of land (mud at this time of year), an outdoor cooking area, and a never-used banya. It kind of smells a bit musty, like old ladies and pink baby powder.
I wandered around and poked into some of the cabinets, and then took the requisite look at the outhouse, which, was, well, an outhouse.
The fruit-seller distracted the enormous beast with more bread while I ran back outside.
My counterpart and program manager asked me what I thought. I was clearly unimpressed. Despite the step down in living conditions, the thing I was most turned out about, I told them, was that I needed more space. Even with one other person in the house, we’d basically be on top of each other.
This earned me some weird looks, and my program manager asked me how I could need more than an entire house to myself. Then I was like, wait, “to myself?”
I don’t know if I misunderstood what they said to me at the beginning (though I am positive I didn’t), but it turns out that the fruit-seller’s mother is in Russia, and there’s nobody living in the house currently.
This made me change my entire tune, basically from a flat “no,” to “I’ll take it and move in tomorrow.” It’s within walking distance of the school, it’s heated by gas (so I won’t have to finagle with coal), it’s space for me.
They also agreed to move out the gigantic beast guarding the front walk, but this leaves me with a smaller, yappy dog on the premises. Oh well. I guess you can’t have everything.
The only thing still up for grabs basically was the price. When they were discussing it in front of me, the fruit-seller said that she wanted a hundred dollars a month, which, in the grand scheme of things, ain’t a bad price for an entire house. However, in the Peace Corps scheme of things, a) I don’t get paid in dollars, and b) I make the equal of a hundred and fifty dollars a month. A hundred dollars is like, two thirds of my budget.
After some negotiating, the fruit-seller wanted 3000 som a month, which is about seventy-five dollars. My program manager called me later that day, and said that if I went to talk to the fruit-seller tomorrow, I could probably get it down to 2500, or about sixty USD. On top of this I’d have to pay for utilities. Gas is kind of expensive, and the fruit-seller says it costs about 1000 som a month in gas to heat and cook. Of course, this will vary greatly, and I’m not sure if that’s 1000 som to heat the house all day every day, or 1000 som just to get a little kick of warmth at night. At any rate, I’ll probably opt to be a little colder in order to save some som, and rely mostly on my electric heater, because electricity is cheaper than gas. The electricity bill will be by default low, considering that it gets shut off here for at least five hours out of the day.
I suppose the good part about this is that it’ll give me a slight raise: I only pay 1200 for my housing currently, and they can give me up to 2000 for it. The extra 1500ish I’ll have to foot on my own. Holistically it’s not that much of a jump, because I currently pay another 900 som on top of the 1200 for dinner. I provide my own breakfast and lunch right now, so also making dinner won’t be that much of an extra financial burden. (Plus, I’ve gotten to the point where complete freedom over my diet seems like manna from heaven. I’ve had my fair share of soups consisting of mutton stock, sheep fat, a few slices of carrot and cubed potatoes, and while that was fine for a while, it’s… getting a bit old. In addition, my own kitchen would be a haven, where I wouldn’t have to dance around other people while I was cooking and be constantly paranoid that I was going to use the wrong bowl for something.)
Basically, we’ll see about talking down the fruit seller the extra 500 som, but right now I need an option and this is definitely the best one I have so far, and the first one to actually be somewhat concrete. Not to mention… dude, how many 23 year olds do you know with their own house? In Kyrgyzstan? I bet the answer is “one.”
Ballin’. That’s me. High living, on one fifty a month. I know, I know. You see me rollin’. You hatin’.
So, tomorrow I’m going to try and talk to the fruit seller. I’d like to move in as soon as possible, basically after they move the yeti guarding the walk and give the place a bit of a cleaning, so it’s not so musty. After that, I’m in like Flynn.
The only snag is that they’re only really looking to rent the place out for a year, as the mother’s due back from Russia next fall. I figure that a million things could happen between now and then (I could go home, the mother could get delayed in Russia, whatever), so this is a good, solid option until then. If it comes down to it, this time next year I’ll be closer to the end of my service, so if it’s an option, I might live with the mother for about a month, until it’s winter vacation. During next year’s winter vacation, I was half-planning on traveling somewhere (I can’t really go anywhere this year because we have In-Service Training smack in the middle of break), and when school starts up again it’ll be February (or even March, depending on the electric situation), and then it might be feasible for me to supplement for an apartment in Bishkek if there’s nothing available in my village, because I’ll only have about six months left of my service. I can’t afford to do it for nigh on two years, but a handful of months might not be as big of a burden.
Though, today almost made me a little sad, in terms of the good parts about having a host family. I made my apple pie today (which, by the way, turned out pretty good). I had woven the lattice topping and was cutting away the excess, when my younger host sister – who had been watching with almost scientific intent the entire time - asked me what I was going to do with the extra crust. I shrugged, and said I’d probably just throw it out.
The older host sister suggested making cookies with the leftover, which was a pretty damn good idea, considering that the pie crust was basically just butter dough. I rolled out the rest and the sisters made round cookies by using teacups and shot glasses to carve circles out of the dough. I kept on rolling it out until there wasn’t any left, and then we sprinkled the tops with cinnamon and sugar, and pressed Hershey’s Kisses into a couple of them.
It was actually enjoyable. It basically cements my conviction that we’ll all be a lot happier if I just come by to visit every once in a while. …it also makes me feel good about the fact that my host mother requested me to be out of the house, so then the onus of leaving isn’t entirely on me. I’m doing what’s going to make us both happy.
So, here’s hoping.
Written Thursday, November 27, 2008
Thanksgiving was more or less a normal day of work for me, since they don’t exactly celebrate it here. But, in lieu of the big feast, I now have a new place to live, which is like a breath of fresh air after breathing through an LA summer smog.
I went through my teaching stint (Thursday is actually my heavy day; I teach five classes straight), and it turned out that my counterpart was also done with work at the same time. (My counterpart works more than I do, because she also teaches fifth, sixth, seventh, and fourth graders in the afternoon. I also teach sixth grade occasionally, but it’s with a different teacher, and I’m technically only a secondary teacher, which is seventh grade and up.) As such, she graciously volunteered to go with me to talk to the fruit-seller about the house, since it was on her way home anyhow.
This was great, because I had been rehearsing ways to bargain for a house in Russian and not cock it up too horribly. Now, I didn’t have to worry about it. We went to the fruit seller’s, and she tried again with the hundred-dollar thing, but we got her down to 2500 pretty quick. To be honest, I think that she was as desperate to have somebody live in the house was I was to find a place to be; this way, it’s one less building she has to keep from going into decay. She said that she’d move the monster-dog by Saturday, and then clean up the house a bit.
The only thing the landlord had reservations about was having guests over – she was concerned about wreck and ruin, I guess. But I’m not exactly planning on throwing frat parties. I probably will have a considerable number of guests, considering that I have, oh, three extra beds in my house (my house, holy crap) and I’m ten minutes from the capital, but I figure that as long as everything’s relatively low-key, it shouldn’t be a problem. At least, I hope not.
My purported day for moving is next Friday, which I originally picked because I don’t work on Fridays (unless they change the schedule again). However, I forgot that Friday is also International Volunteer Day, and in commemoration of the event, I volunteered to go put on a little performance at a homeless children’s shelter that day. I suppose that I could always back out of it, as there’s going to be at least four or five other volunteers going, but I’d feel bad and I’m genuinely interested in attending. I’m hoping that they finish cleaning the house maybe before Friday, and that way I can get the keys a bit earlier and start ferrying things over there on Wednesday or Thursday.
The new place is almost equidistant from the school as I am right now, which is ballin’, because it’s only about a five to ten minute walk from school as it is. However, currently I live directly on the main drag through town, while my new house is set slightly farther back in the community.
Telling the host family that I was moving went off pretty well. The only minor snag was that when the younger sister asked me why I was moving, the mother cut in and said it was because I wanted to live alone. I said yes, but it was also because the mother told Peace Corps that she wanted the room back. Which was true. The mother kind of harrumphed her way out of the room after that, but I was like, dude, you can’t push all this off on me.
And in a certain way I feel kind of bad about the failing of this host family experience, as the past two I’ve done have been so enriching and really helped me learn culture and language. I suppose I could have been more flexible and patient on certain matters, but you can spend all day berating yourself about that, and it won’t get you too far. I also think that part of it might not have anything to do at all with homestay, but more with me just needing to actually live on my own. I think that, if I was in America, I could handle a roommate situation pretty well, but that’s not feasible or allowed here.
And, well, I’m not in America, so now I have a house. Which is probably going to bring a whole host of other issues with it: I’ve never had to take care of a house in an independent sense before, and, while I think I could probably handle it well enough in America, the houses here aren’t equipped like the ones back home. Basically, I’m going to learn how to burn trash and light gas flues and all sorts of things. At least they don’t have farm animals or a serious garden.
But, I mean, maybe I could plant a garden. Haha.
But I’m already planning all the cooking. Roasted vegetables, pot pie, stews, pizza, homemade macaroni and cheese, pasta, sautéed squash with basil and oregano, ohh. You know, cooking was one of those things that I always assumed that I wouldn’t like and wouldn’t be good at it, but I’m not half bad.
My host family did ask who else was living in the house, and they expressed deep concern when I said I would be there alone, and asked if I needed a dog. Which I recognize as a sweet gesture, as dogs here are more of a security device if anything. I assured them that the place did come with its own built-in yappy little terror, so they didn't need to worry. Of course, if I had my way entirely I would not have a dog, but whatevs.
They also invited me to come back and guest whenever I felt like it, which is extremely nice of them. I’ll probably at least do it once every other month or something. If nothing else, I’ll come back to buy eggs and dairy products from the host mother, as it’ll make her happy and I’ll need those things anyway.
So I suppose the whole thing wasn’t bust. I made my pumpkin pie today, which went off pretty well, I suppose. It smells and looks like a pumpkin pie, but the proof of the pudding is in the eating, literally. Making a pumpkin pie from scratch requires a lot less pumpkin than I originally thought, only a half-kilogram. You have to gut it, chop off the skin (which is a task in and of itself) and then steam the pumpkin until it’s soft enough for mashing. Then, you mix in a can of condensed milk and a half-cup of sour cream, a couple of eggs, and cinnamon. I also added some ground cloves, because I’m a fan. You whip it all together, and pour it in the crust.
I had more leftover crust, and was feeling up to it, so I went and got the younger host sister and let her make cookies from the leftovers. She was genuinely excited, as she got to roll out the dough herself, make the round cookies, sprinkle the sugar on top, and grease the pan. I also helped her to cut some of the circles in half and make a flower-shape.
She was working while I was washing the other dishes, and she said that, “Laura, sometimes you’re mean, but sometimes you’re really nice.”
Which is, well, pretty astute, but she laughed when I told her so.
I almost killed my host sister today. Over butter.
Thanksgiving is this Thursday, but since us Volunteers don’t get the day off (it’s not exactly a Kyrgyz holiday), we’re postponing the celebration for Saturday. All the Chui Volunteers are getting together in Bishkek, renting an apartment, and eating ourselves stupid. It’s a potluck, but we’re also going out and buying some of the rotisserie chickens they sell on the street in lieu of cooking a turkey. Cooking a turkey would be ridiculously difficult here, given that most of us who have access to ovens are constrained by the fact that ovens here are essentially oversized toaster ovens, which would be difficult to fit a twelve-pound bird in. That, and we’d probably have to buy a live turkey, which would be a little more adventurous than most of us (myself included) are willing to get.
But anyway, for my part in the potluck, I’m making pies. One apple, one pumpkin. This’ll be exciting, because it’s the first year I’ve ever attempted making pumpkin pie on my lonesome, and also the first time I’ve ever had to start with the actual pumpkin. They don’t really have “pie filling” here. Whatever, I’ll give it a whirl. As long as it comes out reasonably edible, everybody’ll be happy.
But in preparation for such an undertaking as pie, one has to be ready to make some pie crusts. Now, making pie crust is actually one of the easier cooking endeavors to embark upon, considering that a pie crust is essentially flour and butter and an egg mashed together. My host mother sells butter, but as it’s homemade, it’s usually served out of a teacup. I figured that a block of butter would be easier to “measure” with. (When I cook, I don’t actually measure anything. There are no such things as measuring cups here.)
But, anyway, yesterday I went on a shopping adventure for pie. I got some pumpkin and, condensed milk for the pumpkin pie, and apples and lemon for the apple pie. I’ve already been well stocked with cinnamon at home, and I also have supplies of sugar, baking soda, cloves, salt, and eggs. Happy and ready to go on a cooking adventure, I brought everything home.
As one would expect, I put the butter in the refrigerator. Now, I admit that the following row was partially my fault, as I didn’t alert the family to the fact that I had put butter in the refrigerator, and it was not to be eaten. In my defense, though, the family never buys butter, as the host mother makes it. I figured that on that merit alone, my butter was safe.
I have had problems with putting things in the refrigerator in the past. For dry-store items, the family has provided me with a special shelf in the china hutch, so I’ve never had issues there. But occasionally, when I bought eggs, I would poke in the refrigerator for some, and find none left, because they had been used.
Today, I go to school, you know, whatever, and come back. I opened the refrigerator to get some fixings for lunch, and… a huge corner of the block of butter I had bought had been hacked away. I opened the jar of natural peanut butter I had, and there was a noticeable dent made in it, as well.
I may as well mention that my host family (primarily the younger sister, and to a lesser extent the mother) have been driving me up the wall in the past few weeks. If I wear the wrong pair of slippers into the kitchen, it’s dirty. If I use the wrong bowl for washing dishes or clothes, it’s dirty. If I put my sweatshirt in the wrong place, it’s dirty. The younger host sister just will not leave me alone, and the constant assaults on my locked door continue. The frustrations with finding a new place to live and being stonewalled hadn’t helped.
On that note, there’s a small block of apartments, right next to the school. There can’t be more than ten units in it; I figured it was nearly a waste of time to ask about it, but I did anyway. Turns out, my director (principal, basically) owns one of the apartments, and there’s nobody living in it currently. But my counterpart said that she had asked about the apartment and the director had said no. Mystified, I had went to the Peace Corps office and asked about it… turns out the major reason that the director doesn’t want to rent the apartment to me is because the director has a beef with my counterpart. Yep. Here I am, basically homeless in a couple of weeks, and the director won’t rent her empty apartment to me because of my counterpart. Make sense? That’s Kyrgyzstan, sometimes.
So when I picked up the mangled block of butter, the gold wrapper peeled away where the thief had gouged out the corner, I was livid. I mean, like, swirling red spots and instant blood-pressure-spike infuriated.
The only other person at home at the time was the younger sister, and she was obviously the culprit, as the parents hadn’t been at home all day, and neither had the older sister. I called out her name, and she ran and hid. I don’t know, maybe the near-visible waves of blazing fury radiating from my persona tipped her off.
I slammed my way out of the house, cursed my way across town in a matshruka, and pretty much plowed through the throng of people blocking my way to the Peace Corps center. Literally. A guy holding a box ran into me and bounced off.
I was all but ready to descend on my program manager’s office in a storm of hellfire and sulfur, but she was at lunch. This was probably a good thing, as I likely would have yelled fit to bust the windows. For better or worse, I’ve been blessed with a loud voice even when I’m chatting, but if I'm pissed, they’ll hear me in Uzbekistan.
Went around to the Volunteer’s center, where the other people there helped me take the nonproductive edge off my anger. I went back to the program manager’s office to find her still not there, so I set about lurking.
The head program coordinator (my program manager’s boss, basically) saw me skulking, and asked what was up. I gave him an earful.
And, frankly, I know that it’s stupid to get so ridiculously upset over butter, I mean, Christ. I’m not normally the type to fly off the handle as such, but it’s just been a building result of pressure these past couple of weeks. I’m just not comfortable where I live, at all, and it’s starting to affect other areas of my life. I mean, in my last year of college, I went to school full-time, worked part-time, played a sport that took up six days a week, administratively ran said sport, and wrote a thesis. I was extremely stressed at times, and I was always busy, but I was never as… well, angry about things as I am now. I am sure that, even at my most stressed out last year, if somebody had taken some butter from me, I would not have gone off on a murderous rampage.
And I’ve been thinking about that recently, that if that’s going to be the person I’m becoming – somebody who can’t handle a little butter theft – then I shouldn’t be here. Not that I’m seriously considering throwing in the towel at the moment, but where I am right now is obviously not healthy or productive. Things need to change, and they don’t need to be changed in a couple of weeks, they need to be changed now.
So, I told him as such, and my program manager came up the hall, and I repeated it all to her.
The threat of ET (early termination) is always effective. I don’t think it’s something that should be made lightly, of course, but basically, I said that if I don’t get a new place to live where I can be comfortable and happy, I’m not going to stick around to the detriment of my mental health. But after I got finished talking with my program director, I got overwhelmed with a bout of tears, and unfortunately didn’t make it out of the office without becoming too obvious about it.
This attracted the attention of the Country Director (everybody’s boss), and she came out and sat with me while I tried to gain control over what remained of my marbles. She, the head program coordinator, and my program manager all had a meeting, because I was clearly a mess, to the point where even the government had to stand up and take notice.
So, there are a couple of housing options on the table: my counterpart asked a fruit seller in town (who apparently knows everybody) about possible housing options, and it turns out she has a mother who lives by herself. They’ve wanted somebody else to live there for a while. This would likely afford me more space and privacy than I have now, but I admit I’m still not entirely thrilled about it: call me slightly jaded, but I kind of just don’t want to deal with host families anymore, even if the family is only one person.
The other possible option is a house. My counterpart’s friend is moving to Russia soon, and her husband is already there. I could live in the house while they were gone, which is good for me, because, hell, I’ll have a house to myself, and also good for them, as I’d keep the house in order while they were gone. The one cravat is that they’d also be trying to sell the house at the same time, so there’s the chance that it’d get sold while I was living there, and then I’d be out of a place to live again.
Tomorrow, I’m going to go see at least the first option, to see what it’s like. The homestay period has also been cut for me: my program manager said I can move out of my current living situation as soon as possible, as opposed to waiting until December 18, which is when the three-month mandatory homestay period is over.
My program manager also asked if I’d like her to talk to my family about the stolen butter, but I was deflated by that time and just said it probably wasn’t worth it. I just wanted to move.
The day did get better, though: some other volunteer friends and I went out to Beta Stores, the Western supermarket, and I bought two pie plates and another container of peanut butter, to replace my stores that “mysteriously” disappeared.
I was happy about the pie plates, though. As Western-style pie isn’t exactly a common article to be cooked around here (they do have pirogh, which are actually kind of like pirogies – wonder where they got their name – where the filling is put into a circle of dough and then folded over like a Hot Pocket), my host family didn’t have any pans I could borrow, and I was worried that they’d be expensive as an import item. I had been planning on splurging on one for the pumpkin pie, and then just making the apple pie into a tart, by rolling out the dough, piling the filling in the center, and just folding the edges over it and baking it flat on a cookie sheet. But they had cheap non-stick pie plates for a little over a dollar apiece, which is affordable, even on my current budget.
So, happily, I get to make an actual apple pie, with a lattice crust topping. I went home, considerably happier than when I went out.
When I got home, I went through the confrontation about the butter. Though, I do have to wonder if my program manager went ahead and called them anyway, despite me telling her not to do so: the host family had bought a small tub of butter, and my host mother offered it to me, saying that, “When children want to eat, they eat,” in excuse for the younger host sister.
Whatever. I wasn’t in the mood to make a scene about it anymore.
Cooking is therapeutic. I went through and made three piecrusts, and it was satisfying to crumble the butter with the flour, and then punch it into dough with the egg. (Or, maybe just punching things is therapeutic.) I now have three nice rounds of pie dough chilling in the refrigerator, one for the pumpkin, two for the double-crust apple.
And I hope like hell I’ll be out of this house within the week. That’ll be something to have a real thanksgiving for.
Written Wednesday, November 26, 2008
I may actually have a serious option.
Today I went to see the fruit-seller’s house. I wasn’t particularly thrilled about it, because I had been told I would have to live with the fruit seller’s mother, and I didn’t know how I would feel about that. However, it was an option, it was ready for me to see it, and I’m not in much of a position to be too picky.
So, after class, my counterpart, my program manager, and I went over to collect the fruit seller, and then see the house.
My initial impressions weren’t too great, especially because we had to wait outside the premises for about five minutes while the fruit seller went in and wrangled with the absolutely enormous feral dog living there. It was chained up, but basically right next to the walk, so it wouldn’t have been difficult for the thing to just lunge across the walkway and take a chunk out of somebody. Eventually the fruit seller poked her head out and said that only one of us could come in to see the house, because that’s how long she could hold back the dog for.
Dubious, I was the one who went in, as it would be me living there. I pushed back the gate, and ran past the chained behemoth, who was distracted by the fruit-seller tossing hunks of bread into its enormous jaws.
The house itself is a definite step down, luxury-wise, from the one I’m in right now. It’s a lot smaller: there’s a three-season porch-esque room, a bedroom, a living room with a bed in it, and a kitchen. There is no running water inside, but there is a spigot in the yard, and a gravity sink in the kitchen. (A gravity sink looks kind of like a small china hutch. There’s a tank on the top, which you fill from a bucket, which is attached to a spigot. The water from the spigot runs into a basin, which empties into a second bucket. The second bucket you have to manually dump outside.) The outside has a small plot of land (mud at this time of year), an outdoor cooking area, and a never-used banya. It kind of smells a bit musty, like old ladies and pink baby powder.
I wandered around and poked into some of the cabinets, and then took the requisite look at the outhouse, which, was, well, an outhouse.
The fruit-seller distracted the enormous beast with more bread while I ran back outside.
My counterpart and program manager asked me what I thought. I was clearly unimpressed. Despite the step down in living conditions, the thing I was most turned out about, I told them, was that I needed more space. Even with one other person in the house, we’d basically be on top of each other.
This earned me some weird looks, and my program manager asked me how I could need more than an entire house to myself. Then I was like, wait, “to myself?”
I don’t know if I misunderstood what they said to me at the beginning (though I am positive I didn’t), but it turns out that the fruit-seller’s mother is in Russia, and there’s nobody living in the house currently.
This made me change my entire tune, basically from a flat “no,” to “I’ll take it and move in tomorrow.” It’s within walking distance of the school, it’s heated by gas (so I won’t have to finagle with coal), it’s space for me.
They also agreed to move out the gigantic beast guarding the front walk, but this leaves me with a smaller, yappy dog on the premises. Oh well. I guess you can’t have everything.
The only thing still up for grabs basically was the price. When they were discussing it in front of me, the fruit-seller said that she wanted a hundred dollars a month, which, in the grand scheme of things, ain’t a bad price for an entire house. However, in the Peace Corps scheme of things, a) I don’t get paid in dollars, and b) I make the equal of a hundred and fifty dollars a month. A hundred dollars is like, two thirds of my budget.
After some negotiating, the fruit-seller wanted 3000 som a month, which is about seventy-five dollars. My program manager called me later that day, and said that if I went to talk to the fruit-seller tomorrow, I could probably get it down to 2500, or about sixty USD. On top of this I’d have to pay for utilities. Gas is kind of expensive, and the fruit-seller says it costs about 1000 som a month in gas to heat and cook. Of course, this will vary greatly, and I’m not sure if that’s 1000 som to heat the house all day every day, or 1000 som just to get a little kick of warmth at night. At any rate, I’ll probably opt to be a little colder in order to save some som, and rely mostly on my electric heater, because electricity is cheaper than gas. The electricity bill will be by default low, considering that it gets shut off here for at least five hours out of the day.
I suppose the good part about this is that it’ll give me a slight raise: I only pay 1200 for my housing currently, and they can give me up to 2000 for it. The extra 1500ish I’ll have to foot on my own. Holistically it’s not that much of a jump, because I currently pay another 900 som on top of the 1200 for dinner. I provide my own breakfast and lunch right now, so also making dinner won’t be that much of an extra financial burden. (Plus, I’ve gotten to the point where complete freedom over my diet seems like manna from heaven. I’ve had my fair share of soups consisting of mutton stock, sheep fat, a few slices of carrot and cubed potatoes, and while that was fine for a while, it’s… getting a bit old. In addition, my own kitchen would be a haven, where I wouldn’t have to dance around other people while I was cooking and be constantly paranoid that I was going to use the wrong bowl for something.)
Basically, we’ll see about talking down the fruit seller the extra 500 som, but right now I need an option and this is definitely the best one I have so far, and the first one to actually be somewhat concrete. Not to mention… dude, how many 23 year olds do you know with their own house? In Kyrgyzstan? I bet the answer is “one.”
Ballin’. That’s me. High living, on one fifty a month. I know, I know. You see me rollin’. You hatin’.
So, tomorrow I’m going to try and talk to the fruit seller. I’d like to move in as soon as possible, basically after they move the yeti guarding the walk and give the place a bit of a cleaning, so it’s not so musty. After that, I’m in like Flynn.
The only snag is that they’re only really looking to rent the place out for a year, as the mother’s due back from Russia next fall. I figure that a million things could happen between now and then (I could go home, the mother could get delayed in Russia, whatever), so this is a good, solid option until then. If it comes down to it, this time next year I’ll be closer to the end of my service, so if it’s an option, I might live with the mother for about a month, until it’s winter vacation. During next year’s winter vacation, I was half-planning on traveling somewhere (I can’t really go anywhere this year because we have In-Service Training smack in the middle of break), and when school starts up again it’ll be February (or even March, depending on the electric situation), and then it might be feasible for me to supplement for an apartment in Bishkek if there’s nothing available in my village, because I’ll only have about six months left of my service. I can’t afford to do it for nigh on two years, but a handful of months might not be as big of a burden.
Though, today almost made me a little sad, in terms of the good parts about having a host family. I made my apple pie today (which, by the way, turned out pretty good). I had woven the lattice topping and was cutting away the excess, when my younger host sister – who had been watching with almost scientific intent the entire time - asked me what I was going to do with the extra crust. I shrugged, and said I’d probably just throw it out.
The older host sister suggested making cookies with the leftover, which was a pretty damn good idea, considering that the pie crust was basically just butter dough. I rolled out the rest and the sisters made round cookies by using teacups and shot glasses to carve circles out of the dough. I kept on rolling it out until there wasn’t any left, and then we sprinkled the tops with cinnamon and sugar, and pressed Hershey’s Kisses into a couple of them.
It was actually enjoyable. It basically cements my conviction that we’ll all be a lot happier if I just come by to visit every once in a while. …it also makes me feel good about the fact that my host mother requested me to be out of the house, so then the onus of leaving isn’t entirely on me. I’m doing what’s going to make us both happy.
So, here’s hoping.
Written Thursday, November 27, 2008
Thanksgiving was more or less a normal day of work for me, since they don’t exactly celebrate it here. But, in lieu of the big feast, I now have a new place to live, which is like a breath of fresh air after breathing through an LA summer smog.
I went through my teaching stint (Thursday is actually my heavy day; I teach five classes straight), and it turned out that my counterpart was also done with work at the same time. (My counterpart works more than I do, because she also teaches fifth, sixth, seventh, and fourth graders in the afternoon. I also teach sixth grade occasionally, but it’s with a different teacher, and I’m technically only a secondary teacher, which is seventh grade and up.) As such, she graciously volunteered to go with me to talk to the fruit-seller about the house, since it was on her way home anyhow.
This was great, because I had been rehearsing ways to bargain for a house in Russian and not cock it up too horribly. Now, I didn’t have to worry about it. We went to the fruit seller’s, and she tried again with the hundred-dollar thing, but we got her down to 2500 pretty quick. To be honest, I think that she was as desperate to have somebody live in the house was I was to find a place to be; this way, it’s one less building she has to keep from going into decay. She said that she’d move the monster-dog by Saturday, and then clean up the house a bit.
The only thing the landlord had reservations about was having guests over – she was concerned about wreck and ruin, I guess. But I’m not exactly planning on throwing frat parties. I probably will have a considerable number of guests, considering that I have, oh, three extra beds in my house (my house, holy crap) and I’m ten minutes from the capital, but I figure that as long as everything’s relatively low-key, it shouldn’t be a problem. At least, I hope not.
My purported day for moving is next Friday, which I originally picked because I don’t work on Fridays (unless they change the schedule again). However, I forgot that Friday is also International Volunteer Day, and in commemoration of the event, I volunteered to go put on a little performance at a homeless children’s shelter that day. I suppose that I could always back out of it, as there’s going to be at least four or five other volunteers going, but I’d feel bad and I’m genuinely interested in attending. I’m hoping that they finish cleaning the house maybe before Friday, and that way I can get the keys a bit earlier and start ferrying things over there on Wednesday or Thursday.
The new place is almost equidistant from the school as I am right now, which is ballin’, because it’s only about a five to ten minute walk from school as it is. However, currently I live directly on the main drag through town, while my new house is set slightly farther back in the community.
Telling the host family that I was moving went off pretty well. The only minor snag was that when the younger sister asked me why I was moving, the mother cut in and said it was because I wanted to live alone. I said yes, but it was also because the mother told Peace Corps that she wanted the room back. Which was true. The mother kind of harrumphed her way out of the room after that, but I was like, dude, you can’t push all this off on me.
And in a certain way I feel kind of bad about the failing of this host family experience, as the past two I’ve done have been so enriching and really helped me learn culture and language. I suppose I could have been more flexible and patient on certain matters, but you can spend all day berating yourself about that, and it won’t get you too far. I also think that part of it might not have anything to do at all with homestay, but more with me just needing to actually live on my own. I think that, if I was in America, I could handle a roommate situation pretty well, but that’s not feasible or allowed here.
And, well, I’m not in America, so now I have a house. Which is probably going to bring a whole host of other issues with it: I’ve never had to take care of a house in an independent sense before, and, while I think I could probably handle it well enough in America, the houses here aren’t equipped like the ones back home. Basically, I’m going to learn how to burn trash and light gas flues and all sorts of things. At least they don’t have farm animals or a serious garden.
But, I mean, maybe I could plant a garden. Haha.
But I’m already planning all the cooking. Roasted vegetables, pot pie, stews, pizza, homemade macaroni and cheese, pasta, sautéed squash with basil and oregano, ohh. You know, cooking was one of those things that I always assumed that I wouldn’t like and wouldn’t be good at it, but I’m not half bad.
My host family did ask who else was living in the house, and they expressed deep concern when I said I would be there alone, and asked if I needed a dog. Which I recognize as a sweet gesture, as dogs here are more of a security device if anything. I assured them that the place did come with its own built-in yappy little terror, so they didn't need to worry. Of course, if I had my way entirely I would not have a dog, but whatevs.
They also invited me to come back and guest whenever I felt like it, which is extremely nice of them. I’ll probably at least do it once every other month or something. If nothing else, I’ll come back to buy eggs and dairy products from the host mother, as it’ll make her happy and I’ll need those things anyway.
So I suppose the whole thing wasn’t bust. I made my pumpkin pie today, which went off pretty well, I suppose. It smells and looks like a pumpkin pie, but the proof of the pudding is in the eating, literally. Making a pumpkin pie from scratch requires a lot less pumpkin than I originally thought, only a half-kilogram. You have to gut it, chop off the skin (which is a task in and of itself) and then steam the pumpkin until it’s soft enough for mashing. Then, you mix in a can of condensed milk and a half-cup of sour cream, a couple of eggs, and cinnamon. I also added some ground cloves, because I’m a fan. You whip it all together, and pour it in the crust.
I had more leftover crust, and was feeling up to it, so I went and got the younger host sister and let her make cookies from the leftovers. She was genuinely excited, as she got to roll out the dough herself, make the round cookies, sprinkle the sugar on top, and grease the pan. I also helped her to cut some of the circles in half and make a flower-shape.
She was working while I was washing the other dishes, and she said that, “Laura, sometimes you’re mean, but sometimes you’re really nice.”
Which is, well, pretty astute, but she laughed when I told her so.
Saturday, November 15, 2008
.an endless turning stairway climbs
Written today
Argh, I am such a bleeding heart for kittens.
I was walking to the Peace Corps center, when I heard some persistant meowing. I looked down, and there was a tiny grey-and-black kitten wandering amongst the throng, meowing at everybody that passed. Me, being a complete and total sap, reached down and gave its head a scratch.
This was a mistake, because then it followed me the five-block walk to the Peace Corps center. I let it into the compound, because I figured I might be able to give it some creamer or the like.
I gave it some food and put an old shirt from the freebox for it to sit in, but it just stood at the door to the resource center and meowed and meowed until I went back out, and then it sat between my legs.
This is just endlessly depressing, because I can't take it home with me; my host family would have a conniption and a half over it, and I can't keep it at the center. I went back inside to do some business on the computer, but it just kept crying at the door until I couldn't take it anymore.
I eventually put it back outside the Peace Corps office, because I figure it would at least have a better chance at food in the world at large. Then, I got a call on the phone from the front desk, because the guard said the cat wouldn't stop meowing at the door. I said I didn't know what to do, and the guards didn't know what to do with it either.
Goddamn it. Lesson #1: you can't save everything.
Written Saturday, November 2, 2008
Halloween, Kyrgyz-style.
Being that the students need to learn about Western culture for the national exams, and I’m the resident layabout American, the whole Halloween shindig started about two weeks ago; I was charged with teaching about the holiday. How Americans celebrate it, the history of it, etc.
I was actually quite thrilled with this, as holidays make great easy fodder for lesson plans. For one week of classes I gave a small lecture about the holiday (with my counterpart translating) and then passed out crossword puzzles with Halloween words for them to fill in. I even brought some candy to hand out when I taught about trick-or-treating. The next week, I started off with a game called “I’m going to the moon,” to see if they actually remembered any of the words I had given them the week prior.
This particular game consists of the leader (in this case, it was me) saying something like, “I’m going to the moon, and I’m going to bring a Jack ‘o lantern.” Then, you ask one of the kids what they’d like to bring to the moon. The students have to figure out the theme of things they can bring to the moon; in this case, I was looking for words like “ghost,” or “witch,” or “candy.” Then, I handed out a word search.
One of the more challenging things in general about teaching is attempting to be able to rope in all the levels of the class. In each class I teach, there are always a couple hotshots who are genuinely good at English, some that are only really paying attention to try to get a good grade, a few kids who couldn’t care less, and the majority fall somewhere in between. The nice thing about word searches is that you can specify how many words the students have to find, and when the faster ones finish, either assign more words or have them look up the words in the dictionary and compose sentences. Thus, it can be expanded or contracted as needed.
It’s always a little bit frustrating when one of the faster kids finishes the exercise about ten minutes before everybody else and gives me that half-lidded bored stare and says, “I’m done.” It frustrates me because I was that kid a lot of the time and I know what it’s like to have finished already and just sit there getting increasingly bored while the teacher’s just like, “Uh, go take this note to the office for me.”
But, I mean, what can you do? If I taught specifically to the level of the faster students, I’d lose three fourths of the class.
But, anyway, Halloween took up about half of October, teaching-wise. I have a feeling that Thanksgiving will eat up a bunch of November, and then there’s Christmas in December, and maybe even Chanukah. God bless holidays.
Turns out though, that while the Kyrgyz don’t celebrate Halloween, they do have a couple of Halloween-esque holidays. The day Ramadan ends – which was October first, this year – lots of young children apparently go around town soliciting for candy and cakes. I didn’t see any of this, but I assume it’s probably just a branch off of visiting families; supposedly, the day after Ramadan, it’s good luck to visit and eat at seven different houses. At least. My host family didn’t participate in this, for reasons that I don’t know (I think they were just tired), but lots of other volunteers’ families did.
For the Christians, they have a Halloween-like ritual during Orthodox Christmas, which is sometime at the beginning of January. Teaching about American holidays is cool in this sense; I get to learn more about the traditions and holidays around these parts at the same time.
Us Americans, though, decided that we wanted to have our own celebration of Halloween, out here on the other side of the planet. All the volunteers in my oblast (and then some) rented out an apartment for the night in downtown Bishkek, and spent the evening drinking a good amount of liquor, making and eating some apple crisp, watching movies, and going to the infamous Golden Bull nightclub. Some of us dressed up in costumes; I was too lazy and too cheap to go out and think of something, so I went as my fabulous self, but good times were had by all.
A highlight of the evening was the random Dutch guy that some of my friends managed to dig up; he’s in the country for six months, working with a program that helps develop programming for street children. This was his first Halloween party, but he was pretty much just happy as hell to be able to speak with people who understood English well, as he didn’t know any Russian and only a few phrases in Kyrgyz. Good man. Also had some Cuban cigars, which I got to help enjoy out on the balcony. First time I’ve ever had a Cuban; have to say that I never thought my inauguration to the legend would happen in Kyrgyzstan, but that’s just the nature of the beast, I suppose. Reminded me of that summer I spent in D.C., where my fellow poor interns and I would forsake such paltry things as “food” to go smoke cigars with the old boys in the bars, since we hadn’t reached drinking age yet.
Though I drank a fair amount, it was just one of those nights where I wasn’t able to get drunk; weirdly, my body exhibits ridiculous tolerance sometimes, but I was in a good mood anyway and didn’t feel it was absolutely necessary to get my crunk on. Went to the club and danced to an interesting mix of trance, Russian pop, and hip hop until about four in the morning. I was exhausted, and went back to crash for a somewhat uncomfortable night on the floor.
But the apartment was worth it 100%, because it meant that I got a hot shower. The volunteers know a lady who rents out apartments by the night in the heart of the city, for about 1000 som. After this was split up by all the attendees, I ended up paying about the equal of 2.50 USD. For a hot shower, and a fully-furnished apartment in center city. Not bad. Not even by Kyrgyz standards.
Unfortunately, the morning was cut rather short, as I was off almost immediately from the apartment back to my village, because we were having a Halloween party. My counterpart, having lived in America for two years and also having already had a two-year tenure with another volunteer, already knows about the general gist of Halloween, and thus didn’t solicit me too heavily for planning this party. In fact, the only thing she asked me to do was come up with a couple of games for children to play: I suggested bobbing for apples and “pin the tail on the black cat,” but that was about as far as my actual involvement in the planning of this event.
Consequently, I didn’t know much about what was going on. I had rigged up the pin-the-tail game and my counterpart had told the attendees to bring some apples for bobbing, but beyond that, all I knew was that I was supposed to show up at noon. In maybe a costume.
Somewhat unfortunately, though, I got a relatively slow start out of Bishkek, had to wait an inordinate amount of time for the matshruka, which then decided to pit for gas about a fifteen minute walk away from where I lived, so I had to shelp back to my house with all my shit in the rain, before ditching it, gathering the Halloween materials, and then making my way back over to where the party was.
This is the downfall to travel by matshruka. They’re ridiculously cheap, and it’s nice that you can just wave them up from the side of the road to stop, and then just let the driver know where you want to get off, because it saves you from having to know a schedule and the stops of more traditional buses. Unfortunately, this also puts you at the whim of the matshruka driver; if he doesn’t want to drive that day, he doesn’t, so the number of matshrukas on your route fluxuates daily. On top of that, how fast the matshruka gets to where you want to go depends heavily on how many people want to wave it down, on top of traffic or an obstinate herd of cows or whatever else could possibly stop a van full of people from moving. I’ve gotten familiar enough with the matshrukas I usually take to know how popular they are and how long they generally take to go to my usual haunts, but my expectations are thwarted about as often as they’re correct. Plus, stops for gas are absolutely at random and can happen whether the matshruka is full of people or not; I had the unfortunate experience of being on a matshruka that was absolutely crammed full of people that then decided to take a fifteen-minute long detour for gas. At least it wasn’t summer, I guess.
Ended up being late. To be honest, this isn’t really that much of a big deal here; when I showed up about ten minutes into it, nobody said anything except for genuine excitement that I was there, but I still felt bad. I was supposed to give some sort of short speech about Halloween, but as my counterpart wanted to do the explanation at the beginning of the party, she went ahead and did it without me when I didn’t show up on time. I got called up in front of the crowd anyway to make a few remarks, but I don’t think I said anything that my counterpart hadn’t already told them.
But I have to say that my general non-involvement in it did make it really entertaining to watch, as it was a total Kyrgyz remake of the holiday, without direct American-led input. It wasn’t even so much of a party as a stage show. I got there when a bunch of children along with my counterpart were acting out some children’s stories about Halloween in Russian infused with occasional English phrases; a group of preteen girls did a dance number to the Black Eyed Peas’ “Let’s Get Retarded,” some older men with guitars played some acoustic.
The most entertaining (and actually rather clever) one, though, was by far the chicken dance. They had three girls who were, well, dressed up as chickens, along with two roosters. This thing was epic, man; it was a dance number of about six parts that lasted for about a half hour, detailing the main rooster having a confrontation with a dog, and then the hens doting over the second rooster, until the main rooster came and chased him off. Then there was a part where one of the hens laid a golden egg. The main rooster was also some sort of break dancer; he was doing flips and twists and all sorts of things on stage.
I have no idea what this had to do with Halloween, or even how they came up with such a thing, but the overall effect was indeed impressive. I was glad to watch, especially because I was tired from the night previous. When it was over, I talked to my counterpart, who said that the kids were tired from acting and didn’t really want to play games, so the effort I put into making the poster was for naught.
That’s one of the more frustrating aspects of this job; it demands a great deal worth of flexibility. And not just the general flexibility that was wanted from me in the States, as this is more of a “maybe you’ll do all this work and then nothing will come of it and that’s just cool” sort of flexibility. I’ve planned for lessons that were canceled, showed up to meetings that got moved to a different location without being told, planned for seminars that people didn’t show up to, dealt with teaching classes on my own without a plan because my counterpart had to go off and do something or other. Times get randomly changed, people show up late or not at all, you’ll talk to a superior who won’t give you an answer one way or another. (And, of course, they’re doing it in Russian, which just makes it more confusing.)
And it’s not that these things haven’t happened to me ever at home, but it’s almost amazing with what frequency they happen here. Out of five days of work, in at least three of them, the schedule is mutated somehow. This never happened when I went to school. There were always the same four classes a day (block scheduling) and if there was some blip in the game plan – teacher sick, teacher’s meeting, pep rally, whatever the hell – there were always substitute teachers who had lesson plans written by the regular teacher, or everything was accounted for. I can’t recall ever having a class period where there was no teacher. But that’s how it happens here: generally, whenever my counterpart goes off to a teacher’s meeting or whatever, I teach the class. I asked her what the other teachers do, as none of them have a handy Peace Corps volunteer about. Turns out, they just leave the class to fend for itself; sometimes they give tasks in an attempt to give the kids something to do, but as there’s no real accountability for grading here, it usually doesn’t get done.
In reality, I no longer look at the schedule as a guide to classes that need to be taught at a certain time, it’s more like a suggestion. So far it hasn’t really gotten to me, because doing work for no or little end doesn’t bother me much, provided I don’t have other things I need to be doing. Back when I was juggling about a million things, I would have been infuriated if I had made room in my schedule to plan a class or a meeting and showed up and then nobody who said they would be there was there. Here, I’m just like, “Well, I wasn’t doing much else anyway, and I guess now I can go read another book or something.”
The only thing that really concerns me is the effect it has on my work ethic. For the first couple of weeks I really worked hard at my job, spending lots of time crafting lesson plans that were interesting yet attempted to cover all the bases I needed to cover. But now… it’s not that I don’t put any effort at all into it, but it’s considerably less. If chances are extremely high that class is going to get canceled because the students have to clean the school, or there’s going to be a meeting, or class will get randomly cut off in the middle due to some kid ringing the bell prematurely, what’s the point in really busting my ass? I’ll just get unduly frustrated; the things that constantly throw monkey wrenches into my carefully laid out plans are simply beyond my control.
Basically, I don’t need to work harder, I need to work smarter. I’m going to put my real effort into things like grant-writing, where I’m more in control of facilitating things, and in the kids who genuinely want to learn English. This isn’t going to stop the class cancellations or anything else, but it definitely lessens the blow of having something I worked hard on come to nothing.
But, anyway, to be honest I was a little bit grateful that the gaming portion of the festivities was canceled, because after five hours of sleep on a floor following nearly six hours of dancing, I was probably more tired than the kids. I offered a few times to help clean up, but I eventually got shooed out from underfoot, so I just went home, where I promptly collapsed for about four hours. Which was good, because it meant I slept through the period in the middle of the day where there’s no electricity and I can’t do much. The days are getting darker earlier now, and the lights generally don’t work between three and six-thirtyish. Usually, I make this naptime, because, well, it’s dark, and there’s not much else I can do.
I guess in a way it’s kind of nice to have a prescribed naptime, when it’s not irritating me. It’s Kyrgyz siesta. I hook my iPod up to the travel speakers and lay in the dark, wondering when the lights are gonna come back on. I’m considering buying one of those miner headlamp things, so it’s easier to read.
Written Tuesday, November 11, 2008
My mother is probably going to hate this story. Or at least this part of it.
This past week, I went out to Issyk-Kul. First off, a little primer on Kyrgyzstan geography, because I’d be willing to put up some money on the fact that most reading this wouldn’t know the difference between a jailoo and Jalalabad.
Kyrgyzstan is broken up into seven oblasts, which are kind of like states, only far less autonomous. The one I live in is called Chui (pronounced like “chewy”), and has the capital city, Bishkek. Chui is located in the northern center of the country. To the west of Chui is Talas, famous for being the birthplace of the Kyrgyz legend Manas, and for growing beans. To the east of Chui is Issyk-Kul, named after the gigantic saline lake that dominates the area. Directly south of Chui is Naryn, which is mostly famous for being cold as hell and having a lot of mountains. Southwest of Chui is Jalalabad, known for having the largest walnut forest in the world. Bordering south of Jalalabad and Naryn is Osh, home of the second largest city in the country after Bishkek, and a whole lotta Uzbeks. Batken is in the far southwest part of the country, and probably most notable because Peace Corps Volunteers aren’t allowed to serve there, due to possible terrorist activity. Yep. Home sweet home away from home.
But I had a week off from school due to fall break, and though I like my village and Bishkek well enough, decided that it was getting to be about time to slake the wanderlust again and go somewhere. Beats me how I happen to have wanderlust still when I managed to get myself on the opposite side of the world from my birthplace, but there it is.
Decided on Issyk-Kul because there’s not too much of burning interest in Talas, Naryn is ridiculously cold at this time of year, and Jalalabad and Osh are too far away, Of course, I have plans to make sojourns to all the oblasts (that, uh, I’m not forbidden by the government from visiting) at some point during my tenure here – I’d be a fool not to – but for my first excursion I figured I wanted something relatively close and predictable. Plus, I spent too many of my formative years in Michigan and thus have a fetish for large lakes.
Struck out on my own; there were some other Chui volunteers heading out to Issyk-Kul as well, but I didn’t know that until I had already made my own plans. Hopped a matshruka from Bishkek to a town called Cholpon-Ata; Cholpon is basically a quintessential beach town, famous for gorgeous vistas and being taken over by Kazakh tourists during the high season. The name means “father of the sheep god” in Kyrgyz; Cholpon is actually a relatively popular girl’s name. “Ata” is dad in Kyrgyz, “apa” is mom.
The matshruka ride itself was about three and a half hours, and since it was a nicer brand of matshruka than the city-bound variety, wasn’t all that horrible. I dozed, listened to my iPod, occasionally paid attention to the kung-fu movie playing on the mounted television set, and stared out the window. The road that winds its way through the mountains at the border of Chui and Issyk-Kul goes through a pass called “Shoestring Gorge,” which showcases cloud-combing peaks at some of their finest. Of course, it was absolutely freezing when we pitted for a rest there, as a howling wind born from mountain air funnels up through the valley, but, still, quite picturesque. I also saw what was probably the most complete rainbow I’ve ever seen in my life about an hour outside of a town called Tamachy; it was wide and straight, sinking into the horizon with authority, possessing clear borders between the prism of colors.
Unfortunately, given how famous Cholpon-Ata is throughout the country (and this region of the world, even), I was under the delusion that it would be… bigger than it was. Or that there would be, you know, at least a sign. Or, barring that, surely the matshruka would stop at the bus stop.
…of course, none of these things happened, and the sky was rapidly darkening and people were slowly trickling off the matshruka, and it dawned on me that I probably overshot where I wanted to go.
Finally I was the last person on the matshruka, and the driver turned around and asked me where I was actually going, and when I told him Cholpon-Ata, he raised an eyebrow and jerked his thumb back the way we had came.
“About forty minutes that way,” he said, pulling into a small frontier post called Ananiwah.
“Damn it,” I said, fumbling in my pocket for my cell phone.
The great thing about being a Peace Corps Volunteer is that it makes traveling within country very, very easy and cheap. Virtually anywhere you would want to go there’s at least one Volunteer, who can offer free lodging in the form of an apartment or a host family. I had made arrangements to stay with a friend of mine, and I called her and asked her where I was in relationship to Cholpon-Ata and how the hell to get back there.
By now it was pitch dark and pouring wet snow, and I got the glum news that my best option was probably a taxi, which would likely be prohibitively expensive, given that it was past nightfall. I was wondering if it would be cheaper just to see if I could get somebody to rent me a room in Ananiwah, when the matshruka driver waved me over.
He was actually a pretty cool guy, and helped me wave down a late-night matshruka going back the other way. With relief, I thanked the guy and hopped into the second matshruka.
This time I paid more attention, and managed to get out in the center of Cholpon-Ata. Of course, it’s dark as hell because Kyrgyzstan doesn’t believe in streetlights and I have no idea where I am, so I phoned my friend again.
She told me that she actually lived on the other side of town, and that I’d have to walk to where the museum was, and there’d be taxis. So, I get on my walkin’ shoes and start carefully picking my way down the dark roads, trying to avoid broken pavement or open manholes. We’ve already had a volunteer fall down a manhole this year; I’d like not to make a copycat scenario. (The volunteer in question was fine other than a twisted ankle… though, I did see the manhole when I visited Karakol, and holy hell the girl is lucky she didn’t break something. It was about a ten-foot drop down onto concrete rubble and pipes.)
But, anyway, I walk the deserted streets until I find the museum. Of course, there are no taxis. I whip out my phone to call my friend and ask her what to do, but unfortunately, it won’t connect. I ran out of minutes.
So, middle of the night, wet snow-sleet, unfamiliar town, phone out of minutes, no goddamn idea where I am.
“Fuck,” I said.
She had told me before that her street was situated across from a billboard for a mobile phone company, so I resolved to keep walking until I saw the billboard. Even though I was unable to call out due to my lack of minutes, I was still able to receive calls, so I figured that if my friend didn’t hear from me for long enough, she’d get nervous and give me a ring. I kept walking, because I figured that I definitely hadn’t gone far enough yet, and walking would at least keep me warm.
About five minutes up past the museum, I see the glare of headlights reflecting against the road, and hear the tired rumble of an old Soviet dino-car behind me. I instantly move off to the side. I had been walking in the road, because the roads are in marginally better shape than the sidewalks, and not to mention the sidewalks kept on veering off into extremely ill-lit spaces. Unfortunately, walking in the road put me at risk for being plowed over by a drunk driver, and drivers at night here (or at any time, really) tend to be not-so-sober quite often.
So I stepped off into a median to wait for the car to pass and kept walking. Suddenly, I hear a chorus of male voices shouting, “Bikay! Bikay!”
“Bikay,” is Kyrgyz for “older brother,” and is a common term of semi-respect for other men. It’s kind of like saying “sir,” but less formal, or maybe “dude,” but less… surfer bum. Even though I’m a Russian speaker, I use “bikay” all the time, as the Russian equivalent is “molodoy chilovek,” or “young person/man,” and it’s just more awkward and I never hear it. Everybody’s always “bikay.” For the record, for women it’s the opposite – everybody’s “devushka,” or “young woman,” unless they’re clearly a babushka, and then they’re babushka. The Kyrgyz equal is “aijey,” or “older sister,” and though I hear it more than I hear “molodoy chilovek,” it’s still rare. Though, to be honest, most people call me “devushka,” because my heritage errs more on the side of Russian than Kyrgyz. If I looked more Asian, I might hear “aijey” more.
But, anyway, I ignore them and keep slogging through the median, waiting patiently for them to pass so I can reclaim my space on the road. Finally, I realize that the yelling hasn’t stopped and that I’m, actually, the only other person they could possibly be trying to talk to.
I’ve taken to wearing a windbreaker that I picked up at the Peace Corps office one day; a volunteer closed his service and left a windfall of winter wear that he couldn’t fit in his suitcase. The windbreaker is black, sports the Barcelona Football Club emblem (ye-ah), and basically makes me shapeless. I was wearing a dark cap that covered my hair; and besides, I have sort of a masculine haircut as it is. I get mistaken for a dude quite often here, mostly because the native girls tend to dress extremely feminine, and I tend to not dress like a bedazzler mugged me.
So, apparently, I was the bikay they were talking about. I turned around and the car pulled up, packed with about eight people in it, a few shaking half-empty vodka bottles by their necks like baby rattles. The driver was ridiculously plastered, and when he leaned out the window to talk to me, at first I thought it was because he needed to puke.
He asked where I was going and if I needed a ride. This is not nearly as creepy as it would be in the States; of course, Peace Corps doesn’t advocate hitchhiking as a rule, but nearly all of us do it anyway. Many of the “taxis” around town anyway are actually private cars that went to the bazaar and picked up a taxi sign to glue to the roof. There are actual taxi companies in the bigger cities, but there’s no medallion system here. Furthermore, even if you’re just standing on a street with your hand out for a matshruka, sometimes a private car will stop, taxi sign or no, and ask where you’re going. Some volunteers in the more remote villages where public transport doesn’t go are basically required to hitchhike if they want to leave their sites.
I’m close enough to a big city so it’s not a requirement, but I have caught a ride with a car once, when I was trying to get to the Dordoy bazaar on a Sunday (which was a major mistake). I had tried to flag down five or six matshrukas heading that way, but none would stop because they were full. Finally, after about twenty minutes and an attempt to hail the seventh matshruka, a small tan car skidded to a stop. A middle-aged woman opened the door, asked if I was going to Dordoy, and said that she and her son would take me there for twenty som.
More expensive than the matshruka, which is ten som. However, the car was nice and clean, the lady and her son seemed about as legit as can be, and it would be a far more comfortable ride than standing packed on a matshruka, assuming I could ever get one to stop for me. I agreed, and hopped in. Of course, when they passed by the main entrance to the bazaar, I was all like, “Great, this is the part where they rob me,” but it turns out the lady actually worked at the bazaar, and they were going in the back. She even helped me find the main entrance to the bazaar, after it had been made clear that I had no idea where I was going.
But I was definitely not getting in a car at night packed with drunk male twenty-somethings. declined the ride, assuring the driver (who was literally hanging out of the window by this point) that I was only walking home and was almost there. I managed to convince him, and watched somewhat warily as the car swerved around the bend in front of me, out of sight.
Finally, I found the billboard that my friend had described, and rested up against a rock ledge on the side of the road. Eventually my friend called, wondering what the hell had happened, and as it turns out, I had managed to locate her street.
I told her I’d never been so happy to see somebody in my life, and there’s a pretty good chance that it was true.
Ate a bowl of soup that the host mother offered, drank some chai, and all but collapsed into bed.
Cholpon-Ata, as I have learned, is a pretty damn small town, despite all the tourist hype it gets. I got a lot of flack from my host family and other Bishkekers about going to Issyk-Kul during the fall, as it’s far too cold to swim now, but not being able to swim didn’t bother me much. The next day my friend and I walked through town to the public beach, which was essentially deserted, and sat on the edge of the pier to shoot the shit. The lake was actually a remarkably pretty shade of blue, and the wind coming off it wasn’t unpleasantly cool. Mountains surround Issyk-Kul at all sides, so it’s not like the larger Great Lakes, where the water recedes directly into the horizon, but it’s still a damn big body of water.
Stayed another night, to the barely-concealed chagrin of the host mother. You see, me staying a second night means she had to feed me. This is one of the more frustrating things about the high respect given for guests here; in America, I could have just been like, “don’t feed me: I’ll either just go grab something or cook for myself,” but that doesn’t exactly work as well here. I’m the guest; ergo, I must be fed. She did make a particularly delicious laghman, though, which is kind of like noodle stir-fry soup. It’s a Dungan dish, and I hadn’t had it since training, since my new host family doesn’t seem to cook many Chinese-inspired dishes.
During the meal, she kept on mentioning how expensive food was and how loud Americans talked. Sigh. At least the food was good. She also had homemade thick crusty bread that was almost like a baguette.
Took a leisurely start the next morning, off to Karakol and Kyzl-Suu. Karakol is Kyrgyz for “black wrist,” and I’ve heard it’s probably a reference to the fertile valley’s soil and the people who worked it. It’s located on the far eastern side of the lake, and actually a little inland, and is Issyk-Kul’s administrative center. Kyzl-Suu is south from Karakol, on the southern side of the lake, and means “red water/river.” This has been a cause of merriment for those that live there, as one of the training villages is called “Krasneya Retchka,” which happens to be Russian for “red river.” So some of us moved from “red river” during training, to “red river” after training. C’mon, you know that makes you wanna lol.
The most remarkable part about my ride into Karakol was probably the fact that it was there I learned that Obama had won the election. I was about halfway through it when my phone was deluged with text messages, and I admit I grinned the rest of the trip. I still remain more cynical than not, but if he turns out to be half as good as he says he is, then it’s an extraordinary leap up from the last eight years. Hooray, my vote counted for something other than dissention this time! (Well, not actually, as they only count the absentee ballots when the state in question is close, but in theory I made a difference, dammit.) It was also refreshing to have an election that actually ended decisively and didn’t drag on and on and on for months.
But I met my friend in Karakol, and we pitted at another volunteer’s apartment where the host graciously hooked up the hot water heater for me to take a shower, and fired up a bowl of banana hookah for us to pass.
Showers are one of those rare things that just make me unbelievably happy when I can get them. Most families (who are rich enough to have them; several volunteers live in houses that have no bathing facilities) bathe by banya. I don’t mind banya, because, frankly, it gets the job done, and it also makes it easier to wash clothes than if I were living in a house with a shower. However, banya can never compete with a nice firm-pressured hot shower, or a deep tub. I still remain convinced that the Japanese have gotten bathing down to a wonderful science with onsen, but I do admit a strong liking for showers.
But the water heated up in about an hour, so after I had smoked my fill of hookah, I took my shower and we headed out to Kyzl-Suu.
Kyzl-Suu is about a half-hour outside of Karakol, and we got there and immediately went to an NGO where a JICA volunteer worked.
JICA is the Japanese version of the Peace Corps, and when we were originally given sites, I thought I was going to be in Issyk-Kul, since most JICAs are there and I had requested to be put near some. My Japanese is fuck-all rusty, though. We chilled at the JICA’s place for a bit, drank green tea, and she was generous enough to share some of her Japanese provisions with me. Red miso soup, here I come.
The evening was spent in the company of other Peace Corps volunteers and the JICA; we went to my friend’s house and cooked up some ash, or the southern version of plov. Plov is probably my favorite “Kyrgyz” dish, and it’s in quotations because I actually think it was originally Uzbek. It’s basically rice, garlic, carrots and meat cooked up with half a bottle of oil, but it’s really good. I like it best when mixed with fresh tomatoes, but since tomatoes are going out of season and becoming really expensive, a couple of fried eggs mounted on the top ain’t so bad either. Or with homemade pickles. Apparently you can also make a sweet fruit plov, with fruit juice, fruit pieces, and cinnamon as opposed to carrots, meat and garlic, but I’ve never had it.
Ash is the southern version of plov. One of the volunteers had come up from Jalalabad for the week, and had brought a bag of Uzgen rice with him. Uzgen is a region of Kyrgyzstan most prominently known for the rice it produces: brown and rich with a hint of nuttiness. I’m hoping they have some at the bazaar near me in Bishkek. It was fabulous; our ash was meatless, and also sported raisins. We also made a batch of banana bread to round out the feast.
After a heavenly night on my friend’s sofa (I had been sleeping on the floor prior), I packed up and headed out to Karakol since he was going to Bishkek. A bunch of volunteers headed out to Bishkek for the weekend to coincide with the fall break the majority of the teachers had. My friend invited me to travel back with him on Thursday, but the ride from Karakol to Bishkek is about six or seven hours, and I wanted the extra day in Karakol before I sat on a matshruka to get my teeth rattled out for that long.
My friend with the apartment in Karakol had work that day, so when I got back to the apartment, I basically had the run of the place to myself. Which I admit, was absolutely fabulous.
I’m a relatively social person, but like most Americans I crave privacy, which is pretty hard to come by in this part of the world. I hadn’t had a morning in a building by myself to just cook, watch movies, listen to music, and read books in a long time. I went to the bazaar and picked up some squash and made squash and oregano soup, which turned out to be pretty good, though it would have been better if I had a food processor.
I had half a mind to go out and see Karakol, but I admit that the lure of an empty apartment tempted me out of exploring. Besides, I’m sure I’ll be back in Karakol again at some point before I give up the ship here, so I’m not too concerned.
When it was edging into evening, a bunch of volunteers descended on the apartment like a time bomb, since the folk who didn’t leave for Bishkek on Thursday were all leaving on Friday, and my friend’s apartment was a close walk to the bus station.
The ride back to Bishkek was mostly uneventful, sans the beginning. I and two other volunteers got a somewhat later start, so we were heading to the bus station when a matshruka, heading for Bishkek, skidded to a stop in front of us. Of course, we were in the midst of hopping on when we saw that there were a bunch of other volunteers on the same matshruka.
Naturally, we were pleased, but it turned out that one of the group had valiantly offered to stay behind at the bus station and wait for the newcomers. Long story short, I was guilt tripped into staying behind so that the last volunteer didn’t have to make the sojourn alone. This wasn’t really a huge deal, as I was in no particular hurry anyway.
It takes about six hours to get from Karakol to Bishkek, and I don't think I was ever so happy to leave a vehicle as I was to get out of that matshruka. Matshruka isn’t necessarily a horrible way to travel, but it’s definitely not a comfortable way.
Back in Bishkek, I got talked into staying at the apartment with all the volunteers that came into the city to see each other (not that it was a hard sell, mind you), and shenanigans and good times were had by all.
And then I came home and promptly slept for about three days. And that, my friends, is the magic of break.
Thursday, November 13, 2008
Well, it’s finally happened. I got the formal eviction from my host family.
That’s probably a bit overstated, but the short of it is that I have a month to get all of my things out of this house and hit the road.
I learned about it yesterday, when my program manager came by my school to observe my counterpart and I teaching a class. I kind of felt bad that she came on this particular week: the first two days I was out with plague, and the heater in the school’s been broken, so the classes have been shortened from their usual forty minutes down to a paltry twenty five. I don’t even know why they bother; twenty five minutes is NOT enough to conduct a decent class in. When I was in high school, we only had twenty-five minute classes on “speed days,” at the beginning of each semester when we had all eight classes in one day. (At the time, my school was on block scheduling, so a normal day consisted of four, hour and a half long classes. Frankly, I think this is much preferable to the traditional seven-hour day with fifty-minute classes, as it gives the teachers more time to work with and it preps students for college classes, most of which are at least an hour and a half long.) We did nothing on speed days except for receive syllabi. But I digress.
The overall evaluation by my program manager was favorable, mostly because my counterpart is just this side of amazing and taught most of the class. I did a little game with the students at the end to bolster the “team-teaching” part of the drill, though that’s not how our classes are usually run. Typically, she primarily teaches the classes on Monday/Tuesday and the lesson is grammar-based, and I primarily teach the second class on Thursday/Friday, which uses the grammar points but leans towards the conversational. But due to my brush with plague, and the fact that it’s the week after break, and considering class time was halved, things were a little jacked up.
No matter. The program manager basically had nothing but good things to say… and then at the end, added a curious little addendum about stepping up the search for new housing for me. My counterpart assured her that we were already well on our way in the search, though not much of actual suitability had cropped up so far. I’m looking for a more independent option, either an apartment or a guesthouse. (Nearly everybody here has a guesthouse, it’s not a hallmark of the rich like it is in the States. Of course, they’re in varying states of repair – the one at my current house had an unfortunate slug infestation, as we found out during my birthday party – but the vast majority of people have compound housing. Usually the guesthouse is a one or two room building, sometimes with cooking facilities.) The guesthouse at my current family, aside from having more slugs than I’d like, is frequently used by other guests, plus has no real heating system, which is why I’ve got a room rather than the other house.
Most of what people had been offering was a room in a house, which is what I have now. The experience here hasn’t been entirely unsatisfactory; I’d say about eighty percent of the time, things are just fine. It’s the other twenty percent that gets me. I can’t be too upset about it, though: this is my third time in the homestay lottery (first time Japan, second time during PST), and the first two times were great. I figure it’s about my time to get one that’s more along the lines of a dud.
And, as stated before, it’s not all bad. In whole, I like my community and my workplace is about as good as it can get around these parts. The house is pretty darn nice by Kyrgyz standards: they’re certainly a lot richer than my PST host family. They don’t have vicious dogs. The older daughter speaks a modicum of English: probably around as much as I speak Russian.
The major downsides are the fact that my host mother is an incredible neatnik, to the point where it actively intrudes on my life. As I think I mentioned before, she was pissed off because I wasn’t vacuuming my room every single day, and that I had piles of books on the floor. I also can’t cook beans anymore because of the smell, and was almost forbidden from cooking with cinnamon until I threw a big enough fit about it. Now I just have to time my cooking with cinnamon with when she’s out of the house. (The problem with beans is that the prep cooking time with them is at least three hours, and usually I don’t get more than a couple hours of the day with the house to myself.) I also can’t cook in the kitchen if the family is eating in there; this usually doesn’t affect me much, but on the off days when the parents get back from the bazaar early enough to have lunch at the regular time, it does. A couple of times I had to wait an hour or two to start cooking lunch, and dammit, I was hungry. The younger host daughter can be teeth-gratingly obnoxious: just today, I had to deal with about an hour of her banging at the door and pulling at the knobs trying to get into my room after I had locked it. For a while, I was wondering if the groaning doors were simply going to give and bust out of the frame, which would be a fine piece of work to explain to the family. When that didn’t go in her favor, she went outside and banged on my window. It took her the better part of an hour to get bored and try to find something else to do. She also has a penchant for walking into my room whenever she feels like it, unless I lock it, and then she just stands outside wailing until either I let her in or her mother finally yells at her. If I do open the door to demand what she wants, she usually just says, “I’m bored.” When I do let her in, she tends to manhandle all my belongings without asking.
And I realize that some of this is due to a difference in culture: here, they don’t really ask before borrowing things, and it’s not like America where I would always knock before entering my parents’ or brother’s rooms, even if the door was wide open. The Kyrgyz have more of a what’s-yours-is-mine culture, especially among family. But I’m not actually family, and my laptop is an expensive piece of equipment. She doesn’t know how to use it, and I don’t want her to break it because she’s banging on all the keys like a deranged piano composer. It’s not a toy.
And it’s not as though she’s five: she’s nearly twelve.
But, anyway, my counterpart assured my program manager that we were on the hunt. My program manager then told us that we had about a month, because my host mother had called and said that I needed to be out by then.
I was mildly surprised, and asked my program manager why I had been ousted. A couple of weeks ago, the PM came over and had a mediation talk with my host family, after a major blowup regarding the cleanliness of my room. The subject of me moving out came up – my host mother wanted to know what happened after the three-month mandatory homestay period. My PM told her that it was up to the Volunteer and the family; some Volunteers stay with host families for the entire two-year duration, and others move out as soon as possible. (Though, I have noticed that virtually all the Volunteers who have the option to move into an apartment take it. None of the close-to-city Volunteers that I know still live with a host family, unless they’re like me and still under the three-month mandatory stay.)
I decided to be honest and admitted I was looking into moving out, and asked if there was a certain time I needed to be out by. At the time, my host mother said no. Now, though, I apparently need to be out because they want the room back, since lots of their family members pass through.
This is true, since the family is from down south, and they’re the only branch of it to be near Bishkek. Thus, when anybody comes up to the big city, they stay with my host family. There has been considerable traffic in and out of the house, but I have a hard time believing that they took on a Volunteer without taking that into account. Originally, my host sisters were asking me if I was going to stay the full two years, and were very much in favor of it.
In fact, I’m still getting asked that, primarily by the younger sister. She even asked me yesterday, the same day I found out that I had a month to be out of the house. I cocked my head and was like, “Uh, maybe.”
In some ways, I wonder if this is just a graceful way out for all of us. It sets a definite time limit for me to be out so my host mother gets her room back at a concrete date, and it also forces Peace Corps to seriously start putting pressure on the school to find me a place to live, rather than me just wanting to move out but be on an indefinite time schedule to do so. After the whole your-room-is-messy explosion, I had been planning to move out as soon as the three-month interterm was up. But then, I had pause, because all things considered, my room is very warm. It has a huge heater on one side of the room, and a long heating pipe on the other, and when they fire it up with coal, it’s warm enough for me to sleep comfortably in shorts and a t-shirt. I had been in the middle of that debate for a couple of weeks – freedom or not freezing to death? Freedom or not freezing to death? – but I guess this did me the favor of choosing for me. Freedom and freezing to death it is.
But the weird part about it is that my host mother hasn’t said anything to me. My program manager, when telling me, said that the host mother wanted her to break the news to me so she wouldn’t have to do it, which made sense, indirect culture and all. But now that everybody involved knows what’s going on… it’s just weird to not have had a conversation about it with my host mother. You know, ignoring the elephant in the room and all. I’m not sure if I should be the one to initiate it or not, or even what the hell I should say to even start that conversation. “So, you’re kicking me out in a month, huh?” seems a little… well, abrupt. But, I mean, we have to talk about it at some point, unless they’re just gonna wake up one day and I won’t be there anymore. I mean, if that’s how everybody wants it to roll, that’s cool, but it just seems a little too Jack Kerouac for me.
But I have to say that while the news was somewhat, well, shocking at first, I admit that I’ve never been so happy to be kicked out of something in my life. I went home and started packing away my summer clothes, and began sorting through things that I could throw away. Moving is going to be more of a bitch this time, as I’ve accumulated more things than when I arrived – work papers, groceries, a rice cooker, yet more books - but it’ll be doable. I could probably just call a taxi on the slated day, shove everything in it, and have ‘em drive to the new place. That’s the beauty of not owning furniture. If my current host family is feeling generous, they might even volunteer to drive me themselves, as they have one of those SUV/station wagon things.
I’m hoping that I can move someplace permanent this time, for two years. In the past six months I’ve moved four times, and am looking at my fifth in another month. Two of those times have been pretty major moves: first out of college permanently, then out of the country. It’s getting a bit tiresome.
Of course, this brings up the issue of where, exactly, I’m going to go. Despite how close it is to the capital (or maybe because of it) there aren’t many apartments in my village. The one real option I have right now that’s appealing to me is a shared house. There’s a family here, and the mother apparently used to work at the school I teach at. She now lives and works in Moscow, but still has a house here, where her daughter lives. The daughter is about my age, and currently lives there alone. From what I hear of the house, it’s extremely nice, and I’ve even heard rumors of an indoor toilet, which is quite enticing. I would live in the guesthouse and share the bathroom and the kitchen.
Doesn’t sound like a bad arrangement to me. I’d get a house, which means some kind of yard and more space to move around in, but have the privacy of an apartment. I could possibly become good friends with the daughter, or at the bare minimum she probably wouldn’t be banging on my window and trying to break down my door. The one big wrench in the plan was that the same arrangement was offered to the previous volunteer, but Peace Corps refused it because it was too much like a roommate situation.
One of the rules about housing is that Volunteers can’t live with anybody, be it another Volunteer or a host country national, in a roommate-type arrangement. It’s either living with a host family or living alone in an apartment. While I can sort of understand why they wouldn’t want Volunteers living together, I admit that I can’t quite wrap my head around why we can’t be roommates with (trustworthy) HCNs. Frankly, in many ways I think it’s preferable to living alone: there would at least be somebody there who spoke the native language (and in this case, it’s a genuine native Russian speaker, as opposed to a Kyrgyz family who speaks Russian on the side), and it would be a little less lonely, and probably more secure.
But my bigger argument is that this arrangement isn’t like a roommate situation at all. To me, having a “roommate” implies that you’re sharing an assigned living unit, usually an apartment, and splitting rent. Which… is not the case here, as the daughter owns the house and I’d be paying her rent. Furthermore, I know that some Volunteers live in a “family” with only one other person, and I know that other Volunteers live with families but eat no meals with them, and I even know of a Volunteer currently who lives in a straight up roommate situation. So, uh, I’m hoping that I can convince them, because I really do not want to have to live with another host family. I’m ready for some more space.
In addition, the previous volunteer in my village actually ended up living in Bishkek. Now, it’s been stated over and over that he was an exception, and I’ve heard varying stories as to how, exactly, he managed to be such a one. I would be over the moon to live in Bishkek and commute, but the problem there is that he had to supplement his income to support himself there, and all the other Volunteers that lived in Bishkek had to do the same. I don’t think I can afford to do that on my own dime. I would feel bad asking my parents to pay for me to live here; they’ve already footed a considerable amount of the bill for college. Besides, it just seems asinine to have to pay to be a Peace Corps Volunteer.
So, option one is to try and talk Peace Corps into letting me into the shared housing situation. Of course, I’d want to see the place first and meet the daughter, but to be entirely honest, it’s looking more and more like that or bust. And by “bust,” I mean living with another family in the same situation I’m in now. If it came down to it, though, I think I’d rather take a chance with another family than live with this one for the duration of my service (not that I have the choice now, but in theory). I’m just not comfortable here.
It’s just so frustrating, because I know I’m not a difficult person to get along with. In the past five years I’ve had two other host families, and four roommates. None of the major disagreements we’ve had have rotated around living styles. Not that there was never any “get your underwear off my side of the room,” rebukes, but nothing like this.
But, to a certain extent, I can see where the conflict is coming from, at least where the mother is concerned. In Kyrgyzstan, the house is the mother’s domain, where she reigns supreme and all is done to her specifications. In comes the American, with her own ways of doing things, and mode of cooking. One of the minor tiffs we had was over the cooking of garlic. Here, garlic is one of the last things you add to a dish. Whereas I vastly prefer the method of having it be one of the first things, sautéed with some onions and a bit of oil. The first time she saw me doing it, she bodily stopped me from adding the garlic, all like, “What are you doing? You don’t put in the garlic yet!” And I kind of looked at her strangely, before saying something along the lines of, “American cooking is different.” Once I was making a vegetable stew, and we had an argument over how many tomatoes I should add. I was putting in six, and she was absolutely adamant that I only needed two.
It still kind of weirds me out, because if there was a foreigner in my house, cooking a meal that only she herself was eating, I don’t think I’d try and stop her putting in the garlic whenever the hell she wanted. Hell, even if she was cooking a meal that I was going to eat, I think I’d just assume that she knew what she was doing. I would never tell my host mother not to put so many carrots in a plov or whatever. If I were attempting to cook manty, I would welcome her help, because she’s a pro. However, when I’m building a stir-fry, I’ll flatter myself by thinking I’ve got more experience in that arena.
It was explained to me during the intervention talk I had with my host mother that getting all up in my business is viewed as the mother’s job, especially because I’m female. She’s trying to better me in some ways, make me more fastidious about being clean and to know the proper usage of garlic. I know that she’s not singling me out: she’s always yelling at the two daughters about something or other, usually having something to do with how dirty the room is.
I suppose I can respect that method of parenting, at any rate it’s not really my business, but it just stresses me out. The day after she stormed into my room like hellfire and started yelling about how unacceptably dirty my entire life was, I had splitting headaches so bad that I couldn’t do anything else but curl up in front of my heater and listen to my blood pound in my ears. My current lifestyle is, by default, extremely stressful, and it makes it worse when the place where I live is a major source of the stress.
The younger sister, though, I simply can’t wrap my head around. I mean, I understand that twelve-year-olds can have a tendency to be hyperactive, but sometimes it just goes to an extreme. The whole hour-long battering at my door thing is an example: I had shut my door and told her I was going to get dressed for class, and not two minutes later she came back knocking. I opened the door to see what she wanted, just to make sure that there wasn’t something valid going on, and she said she was bored. I closed the door again, and immediately she knocked. I ignored her, because I had already explained what I was doing and clearly two minutes was not enough time for me to be dressed and ready again, especially because I was dressing business casual. As she stood outside for about a half hour, straining at the door, I just couldn’t understand. Clearly, I didn’t want her in there. What did she think was going to happen if she managed to break down the door? I was going to be pissed.
Part of the problem here is scheduling. As I think I mentioned before, on the mornings when I don’t have class until later, I’m the only other person in the house with the younger sister, since both parents are at work and the older sister has school in the morning. She typically doesn’t get that outlandish when the parents are around, because if I get too upset the mother will hear and that’ll be the end of it. I have talked to the parents about her occasionally, and they just tell me to smack her if she gets too obnoxious. Which, I’m sorry, but I’m not comfortable with doing. Besides, I don’t think I should have to hit a twelve-year-old to get the point across that the door is closed and she can’t be in my room at the moment. She’s not four, she’s not stupid or slow, and she’s not a dog. And it’s not as though my room is consistently barred; I do tend to keep the door closed most of the time, generally because I’m listening to music and I don’t want to disturb anybody, but when people knock, I nearly always let them in. I’ve also started keeping the door locked most of the time, which is unfortunate, but since the younger host sister almost never knocks, I keep it locked to make a point. And, also, to keep her from walking in on me naked, which has happened a couple of times. Her seeing me naked doesn’t really bother me all that much, but the lack of knocking does. Sometimes, the younger sister is just fine and it’s not a problem having her in my room. Sometimes, I have to bodily remove her from the premises and hold the door closed while she tries to force it open from the outside.
In my previous host family, I had a younger host sister at eight, and an younger host brother at ten. I never had issues with them. They always knocked when they wanted to come in, asked before they touched things, and so forth. I do know that the PST host families get considerably more training than the permanent site host families, and they’re also paid a lot more, but I also think that the children at my previous host family were simply better behaved as a whole.
So, hopefully this time next month I will have moved or be on my way to moving somewhere that won’t be so upsetting. The mother can have her room back to vacuum every hour on the hour, and maybe I can get some peace.
Argh, I am such a bleeding heart for kittens.
I was walking to the Peace Corps center, when I heard some persistant meowing. I looked down, and there was a tiny grey-and-black kitten wandering amongst the throng, meowing at everybody that passed. Me, being a complete and total sap, reached down and gave its head a scratch.
This was a mistake, because then it followed me the five-block walk to the Peace Corps center. I let it into the compound, because I figured I might be able to give it some creamer or the like.
I gave it some food and put an old shirt from the freebox for it to sit in, but it just stood at the door to the resource center and meowed and meowed until I went back out, and then it sat between my legs.
This is just endlessly depressing, because I can't take it home with me; my host family would have a conniption and a half over it, and I can't keep it at the center. I went back inside to do some business on the computer, but it just kept crying at the door until I couldn't take it anymore.
I eventually put it back outside the Peace Corps office, because I figure it would at least have a better chance at food in the world at large. Then, I got a call on the phone from the front desk, because the guard said the cat wouldn't stop meowing at the door. I said I didn't know what to do, and the guards didn't know what to do with it either.
Goddamn it. Lesson #1: you can't save everything.
Written Saturday, November 2, 2008
Halloween, Kyrgyz-style.
Being that the students need to learn about Western culture for the national exams, and I’m the resident layabout American, the whole Halloween shindig started about two weeks ago; I was charged with teaching about the holiday. How Americans celebrate it, the history of it, etc.
I was actually quite thrilled with this, as holidays make great easy fodder for lesson plans. For one week of classes I gave a small lecture about the holiday (with my counterpart translating) and then passed out crossword puzzles with Halloween words for them to fill in. I even brought some candy to hand out when I taught about trick-or-treating. The next week, I started off with a game called “I’m going to the moon,” to see if they actually remembered any of the words I had given them the week prior.
This particular game consists of the leader (in this case, it was me) saying something like, “I’m going to the moon, and I’m going to bring a Jack ‘o lantern.” Then, you ask one of the kids what they’d like to bring to the moon. The students have to figure out the theme of things they can bring to the moon; in this case, I was looking for words like “ghost,” or “witch,” or “candy.” Then, I handed out a word search.
One of the more challenging things in general about teaching is attempting to be able to rope in all the levels of the class. In each class I teach, there are always a couple hotshots who are genuinely good at English, some that are only really paying attention to try to get a good grade, a few kids who couldn’t care less, and the majority fall somewhere in between. The nice thing about word searches is that you can specify how many words the students have to find, and when the faster ones finish, either assign more words or have them look up the words in the dictionary and compose sentences. Thus, it can be expanded or contracted as needed.
It’s always a little bit frustrating when one of the faster kids finishes the exercise about ten minutes before everybody else and gives me that half-lidded bored stare and says, “I’m done.” It frustrates me because I was that kid a lot of the time and I know what it’s like to have finished already and just sit there getting increasingly bored while the teacher’s just like, “Uh, go take this note to the office for me.”
But, I mean, what can you do? If I taught specifically to the level of the faster students, I’d lose three fourths of the class.
But, anyway, Halloween took up about half of October, teaching-wise. I have a feeling that Thanksgiving will eat up a bunch of November, and then there’s Christmas in December, and maybe even Chanukah. God bless holidays.
Turns out though, that while the Kyrgyz don’t celebrate Halloween, they do have a couple of Halloween-esque holidays. The day Ramadan ends – which was October first, this year – lots of young children apparently go around town soliciting for candy and cakes. I didn’t see any of this, but I assume it’s probably just a branch off of visiting families; supposedly, the day after Ramadan, it’s good luck to visit and eat at seven different houses. At least. My host family didn’t participate in this, for reasons that I don’t know (I think they were just tired), but lots of other volunteers’ families did.
For the Christians, they have a Halloween-like ritual during Orthodox Christmas, which is sometime at the beginning of January. Teaching about American holidays is cool in this sense; I get to learn more about the traditions and holidays around these parts at the same time.
Us Americans, though, decided that we wanted to have our own celebration of Halloween, out here on the other side of the planet. All the volunteers in my oblast (and then some) rented out an apartment for the night in downtown Bishkek, and spent the evening drinking a good amount of liquor, making and eating some apple crisp, watching movies, and going to the infamous Golden Bull nightclub. Some of us dressed up in costumes; I was too lazy and too cheap to go out and think of something, so I went as my fabulous self, but good times were had by all.
A highlight of the evening was the random Dutch guy that some of my friends managed to dig up; he’s in the country for six months, working with a program that helps develop programming for street children. This was his first Halloween party, but he was pretty much just happy as hell to be able to speak with people who understood English well, as he didn’t know any Russian and only a few phrases in Kyrgyz. Good man. Also had some Cuban cigars, which I got to help enjoy out on the balcony. First time I’ve ever had a Cuban; have to say that I never thought my inauguration to the legend would happen in Kyrgyzstan, but that’s just the nature of the beast, I suppose. Reminded me of that summer I spent in D.C., where my fellow poor interns and I would forsake such paltry things as “food” to go smoke cigars with the old boys in the bars, since we hadn’t reached drinking age yet.
Though I drank a fair amount, it was just one of those nights where I wasn’t able to get drunk; weirdly, my body exhibits ridiculous tolerance sometimes, but I was in a good mood anyway and didn’t feel it was absolutely necessary to get my crunk on. Went to the club and danced to an interesting mix of trance, Russian pop, and hip hop until about four in the morning. I was exhausted, and went back to crash for a somewhat uncomfortable night on the floor.
But the apartment was worth it 100%, because it meant that I got a hot shower. The volunteers know a lady who rents out apartments by the night in the heart of the city, for about 1000 som. After this was split up by all the attendees, I ended up paying about the equal of 2.50 USD. For a hot shower, and a fully-furnished apartment in center city. Not bad. Not even by Kyrgyz standards.
Unfortunately, the morning was cut rather short, as I was off almost immediately from the apartment back to my village, because we were having a Halloween party. My counterpart, having lived in America for two years and also having already had a two-year tenure with another volunteer, already knows about the general gist of Halloween, and thus didn’t solicit me too heavily for planning this party. In fact, the only thing she asked me to do was come up with a couple of games for children to play: I suggested bobbing for apples and “pin the tail on the black cat,” but that was about as far as my actual involvement in the planning of this event.
Consequently, I didn’t know much about what was going on. I had rigged up the pin-the-tail game and my counterpart had told the attendees to bring some apples for bobbing, but beyond that, all I knew was that I was supposed to show up at noon. In maybe a costume.
Somewhat unfortunately, though, I got a relatively slow start out of Bishkek, had to wait an inordinate amount of time for the matshruka, which then decided to pit for gas about a fifteen minute walk away from where I lived, so I had to shelp back to my house with all my shit in the rain, before ditching it, gathering the Halloween materials, and then making my way back over to where the party was.
This is the downfall to travel by matshruka. They’re ridiculously cheap, and it’s nice that you can just wave them up from the side of the road to stop, and then just let the driver know where you want to get off, because it saves you from having to know a schedule and the stops of more traditional buses. Unfortunately, this also puts you at the whim of the matshruka driver; if he doesn’t want to drive that day, he doesn’t, so the number of matshrukas on your route fluxuates daily. On top of that, how fast the matshruka gets to where you want to go depends heavily on how many people want to wave it down, on top of traffic or an obstinate herd of cows or whatever else could possibly stop a van full of people from moving. I’ve gotten familiar enough with the matshrukas I usually take to know how popular they are and how long they generally take to go to my usual haunts, but my expectations are thwarted about as often as they’re correct. Plus, stops for gas are absolutely at random and can happen whether the matshruka is full of people or not; I had the unfortunate experience of being on a matshruka that was absolutely crammed full of people that then decided to take a fifteen-minute long detour for gas. At least it wasn’t summer, I guess.
Ended up being late. To be honest, this isn’t really that much of a big deal here; when I showed up about ten minutes into it, nobody said anything except for genuine excitement that I was there, but I still felt bad. I was supposed to give some sort of short speech about Halloween, but as my counterpart wanted to do the explanation at the beginning of the party, she went ahead and did it without me when I didn’t show up on time. I got called up in front of the crowd anyway to make a few remarks, but I don’t think I said anything that my counterpart hadn’t already told them.
But I have to say that my general non-involvement in it did make it really entertaining to watch, as it was a total Kyrgyz remake of the holiday, without direct American-led input. It wasn’t even so much of a party as a stage show. I got there when a bunch of children along with my counterpart were acting out some children’s stories about Halloween in Russian infused with occasional English phrases; a group of preteen girls did a dance number to the Black Eyed Peas’ “Let’s Get Retarded,” some older men with guitars played some acoustic.
The most entertaining (and actually rather clever) one, though, was by far the chicken dance. They had three girls who were, well, dressed up as chickens, along with two roosters. This thing was epic, man; it was a dance number of about six parts that lasted for about a half hour, detailing the main rooster having a confrontation with a dog, and then the hens doting over the second rooster, until the main rooster came and chased him off. Then there was a part where one of the hens laid a golden egg. The main rooster was also some sort of break dancer; he was doing flips and twists and all sorts of things on stage.
I have no idea what this had to do with Halloween, or even how they came up with such a thing, but the overall effect was indeed impressive. I was glad to watch, especially because I was tired from the night previous. When it was over, I talked to my counterpart, who said that the kids were tired from acting and didn’t really want to play games, so the effort I put into making the poster was for naught.
That’s one of the more frustrating aspects of this job; it demands a great deal worth of flexibility. And not just the general flexibility that was wanted from me in the States, as this is more of a “maybe you’ll do all this work and then nothing will come of it and that’s just cool” sort of flexibility. I’ve planned for lessons that were canceled, showed up to meetings that got moved to a different location without being told, planned for seminars that people didn’t show up to, dealt with teaching classes on my own without a plan because my counterpart had to go off and do something or other. Times get randomly changed, people show up late or not at all, you’ll talk to a superior who won’t give you an answer one way or another. (And, of course, they’re doing it in Russian, which just makes it more confusing.)
And it’s not that these things haven’t happened to me ever at home, but it’s almost amazing with what frequency they happen here. Out of five days of work, in at least three of them, the schedule is mutated somehow. This never happened when I went to school. There were always the same four classes a day (block scheduling) and if there was some blip in the game plan – teacher sick, teacher’s meeting, pep rally, whatever the hell – there were always substitute teachers who had lesson plans written by the regular teacher, or everything was accounted for. I can’t recall ever having a class period where there was no teacher. But that’s how it happens here: generally, whenever my counterpart goes off to a teacher’s meeting or whatever, I teach the class. I asked her what the other teachers do, as none of them have a handy Peace Corps volunteer about. Turns out, they just leave the class to fend for itself; sometimes they give tasks in an attempt to give the kids something to do, but as there’s no real accountability for grading here, it usually doesn’t get done.
In reality, I no longer look at the schedule as a guide to classes that need to be taught at a certain time, it’s more like a suggestion. So far it hasn’t really gotten to me, because doing work for no or little end doesn’t bother me much, provided I don’t have other things I need to be doing. Back when I was juggling about a million things, I would have been infuriated if I had made room in my schedule to plan a class or a meeting and showed up and then nobody who said they would be there was there. Here, I’m just like, “Well, I wasn’t doing much else anyway, and I guess now I can go read another book or something.”
The only thing that really concerns me is the effect it has on my work ethic. For the first couple of weeks I really worked hard at my job, spending lots of time crafting lesson plans that were interesting yet attempted to cover all the bases I needed to cover. But now… it’s not that I don’t put any effort at all into it, but it’s considerably less. If chances are extremely high that class is going to get canceled because the students have to clean the school, or there’s going to be a meeting, or class will get randomly cut off in the middle due to some kid ringing the bell prematurely, what’s the point in really busting my ass? I’ll just get unduly frustrated; the things that constantly throw monkey wrenches into my carefully laid out plans are simply beyond my control.
Basically, I don’t need to work harder, I need to work smarter. I’m going to put my real effort into things like grant-writing, where I’m more in control of facilitating things, and in the kids who genuinely want to learn English. This isn’t going to stop the class cancellations or anything else, but it definitely lessens the blow of having something I worked hard on come to nothing.
But, anyway, to be honest I was a little bit grateful that the gaming portion of the festivities was canceled, because after five hours of sleep on a floor following nearly six hours of dancing, I was probably more tired than the kids. I offered a few times to help clean up, but I eventually got shooed out from underfoot, so I just went home, where I promptly collapsed for about four hours. Which was good, because it meant I slept through the period in the middle of the day where there’s no electricity and I can’t do much. The days are getting darker earlier now, and the lights generally don’t work between three and six-thirtyish. Usually, I make this naptime, because, well, it’s dark, and there’s not much else I can do.
I guess in a way it’s kind of nice to have a prescribed naptime, when it’s not irritating me. It’s Kyrgyz siesta. I hook my iPod up to the travel speakers and lay in the dark, wondering when the lights are gonna come back on. I’m considering buying one of those miner headlamp things, so it’s easier to read.
Written Tuesday, November 11, 2008
My mother is probably going to hate this story. Or at least this part of it.
This past week, I went out to Issyk-Kul. First off, a little primer on Kyrgyzstan geography, because I’d be willing to put up some money on the fact that most reading this wouldn’t know the difference between a jailoo and Jalalabad.
Kyrgyzstan is broken up into seven oblasts, which are kind of like states, only far less autonomous. The one I live in is called Chui (pronounced like “chewy”), and has the capital city, Bishkek. Chui is located in the northern center of the country. To the west of Chui is Talas, famous for being the birthplace of the Kyrgyz legend Manas, and for growing beans. To the east of Chui is Issyk-Kul, named after the gigantic saline lake that dominates the area. Directly south of Chui is Naryn, which is mostly famous for being cold as hell and having a lot of mountains. Southwest of Chui is Jalalabad, known for having the largest walnut forest in the world. Bordering south of Jalalabad and Naryn is Osh, home of the second largest city in the country after Bishkek, and a whole lotta Uzbeks. Batken is in the far southwest part of the country, and probably most notable because Peace Corps Volunteers aren’t allowed to serve there, due to possible terrorist activity. Yep. Home sweet home away from home.
But I had a week off from school due to fall break, and though I like my village and Bishkek well enough, decided that it was getting to be about time to slake the wanderlust again and go somewhere. Beats me how I happen to have wanderlust still when I managed to get myself on the opposite side of the world from my birthplace, but there it is.
Decided on Issyk-Kul because there’s not too much of burning interest in Talas, Naryn is ridiculously cold at this time of year, and Jalalabad and Osh are too far away, Of course, I have plans to make sojourns to all the oblasts (that, uh, I’m not forbidden by the government from visiting) at some point during my tenure here – I’d be a fool not to – but for my first excursion I figured I wanted something relatively close and predictable. Plus, I spent too many of my formative years in Michigan and thus have a fetish for large lakes.
Struck out on my own; there were some other Chui volunteers heading out to Issyk-Kul as well, but I didn’t know that until I had already made my own plans. Hopped a matshruka from Bishkek to a town called Cholpon-Ata; Cholpon is basically a quintessential beach town, famous for gorgeous vistas and being taken over by Kazakh tourists during the high season. The name means “father of the sheep god” in Kyrgyz; Cholpon is actually a relatively popular girl’s name. “Ata” is dad in Kyrgyz, “apa” is mom.
The matshruka ride itself was about three and a half hours, and since it was a nicer brand of matshruka than the city-bound variety, wasn’t all that horrible. I dozed, listened to my iPod, occasionally paid attention to the kung-fu movie playing on the mounted television set, and stared out the window. The road that winds its way through the mountains at the border of Chui and Issyk-Kul goes through a pass called “Shoestring Gorge,” which showcases cloud-combing peaks at some of their finest. Of course, it was absolutely freezing when we pitted for a rest there, as a howling wind born from mountain air funnels up through the valley, but, still, quite picturesque. I also saw what was probably the most complete rainbow I’ve ever seen in my life about an hour outside of a town called Tamachy; it was wide and straight, sinking into the horizon with authority, possessing clear borders between the prism of colors.
Unfortunately, given how famous Cholpon-Ata is throughout the country (and this region of the world, even), I was under the delusion that it would be… bigger than it was. Or that there would be, you know, at least a sign. Or, barring that, surely the matshruka would stop at the bus stop.
…of course, none of these things happened, and the sky was rapidly darkening and people were slowly trickling off the matshruka, and it dawned on me that I probably overshot where I wanted to go.
Finally I was the last person on the matshruka, and the driver turned around and asked me where I was actually going, and when I told him Cholpon-Ata, he raised an eyebrow and jerked his thumb back the way we had came.
“About forty minutes that way,” he said, pulling into a small frontier post called Ananiwah.
“Damn it,” I said, fumbling in my pocket for my cell phone.
The great thing about being a Peace Corps Volunteer is that it makes traveling within country very, very easy and cheap. Virtually anywhere you would want to go there’s at least one Volunteer, who can offer free lodging in the form of an apartment or a host family. I had made arrangements to stay with a friend of mine, and I called her and asked her where I was in relationship to Cholpon-Ata and how the hell to get back there.
By now it was pitch dark and pouring wet snow, and I got the glum news that my best option was probably a taxi, which would likely be prohibitively expensive, given that it was past nightfall. I was wondering if it would be cheaper just to see if I could get somebody to rent me a room in Ananiwah, when the matshruka driver waved me over.
He was actually a pretty cool guy, and helped me wave down a late-night matshruka going back the other way. With relief, I thanked the guy and hopped into the second matshruka.
This time I paid more attention, and managed to get out in the center of Cholpon-Ata. Of course, it’s dark as hell because Kyrgyzstan doesn’t believe in streetlights and I have no idea where I am, so I phoned my friend again.
She told me that she actually lived on the other side of town, and that I’d have to walk to where the museum was, and there’d be taxis. So, I get on my walkin’ shoes and start carefully picking my way down the dark roads, trying to avoid broken pavement or open manholes. We’ve already had a volunteer fall down a manhole this year; I’d like not to make a copycat scenario. (The volunteer in question was fine other than a twisted ankle… though, I did see the manhole when I visited Karakol, and holy hell the girl is lucky she didn’t break something. It was about a ten-foot drop down onto concrete rubble and pipes.)
But, anyway, I walk the deserted streets until I find the museum. Of course, there are no taxis. I whip out my phone to call my friend and ask her what to do, but unfortunately, it won’t connect. I ran out of minutes.
So, middle of the night, wet snow-sleet, unfamiliar town, phone out of minutes, no goddamn idea where I am.
“Fuck,” I said.
She had told me before that her street was situated across from a billboard for a mobile phone company, so I resolved to keep walking until I saw the billboard. Even though I was unable to call out due to my lack of minutes, I was still able to receive calls, so I figured that if my friend didn’t hear from me for long enough, she’d get nervous and give me a ring. I kept walking, because I figured that I definitely hadn’t gone far enough yet, and walking would at least keep me warm.
About five minutes up past the museum, I see the glare of headlights reflecting against the road, and hear the tired rumble of an old Soviet dino-car behind me. I instantly move off to the side. I had been walking in the road, because the roads are in marginally better shape than the sidewalks, and not to mention the sidewalks kept on veering off into extremely ill-lit spaces. Unfortunately, walking in the road put me at risk for being plowed over by a drunk driver, and drivers at night here (or at any time, really) tend to be not-so-sober quite often.
So I stepped off into a median to wait for the car to pass and kept walking. Suddenly, I hear a chorus of male voices shouting, “Bikay! Bikay!”
“Bikay,” is Kyrgyz for “older brother,” and is a common term of semi-respect for other men. It’s kind of like saying “sir,” but less formal, or maybe “dude,” but less… surfer bum. Even though I’m a Russian speaker, I use “bikay” all the time, as the Russian equivalent is “molodoy chilovek,” or “young person/man,” and it’s just more awkward and I never hear it. Everybody’s always “bikay.” For the record, for women it’s the opposite – everybody’s “devushka,” or “young woman,” unless they’re clearly a babushka, and then they’re babushka. The Kyrgyz equal is “aijey,” or “older sister,” and though I hear it more than I hear “molodoy chilovek,” it’s still rare. Though, to be honest, most people call me “devushka,” because my heritage errs more on the side of Russian than Kyrgyz. If I looked more Asian, I might hear “aijey” more.
But, anyway, I ignore them and keep slogging through the median, waiting patiently for them to pass so I can reclaim my space on the road. Finally, I realize that the yelling hasn’t stopped and that I’m, actually, the only other person they could possibly be trying to talk to.
I’ve taken to wearing a windbreaker that I picked up at the Peace Corps office one day; a volunteer closed his service and left a windfall of winter wear that he couldn’t fit in his suitcase. The windbreaker is black, sports the Barcelona Football Club emblem (ye-ah), and basically makes me shapeless. I was wearing a dark cap that covered my hair; and besides, I have sort of a masculine haircut as it is. I get mistaken for a dude quite often here, mostly because the native girls tend to dress extremely feminine, and I tend to not dress like a bedazzler mugged me.
So, apparently, I was the bikay they were talking about. I turned around and the car pulled up, packed with about eight people in it, a few shaking half-empty vodka bottles by their necks like baby rattles. The driver was ridiculously plastered, and when he leaned out the window to talk to me, at first I thought it was because he needed to puke.
He asked where I was going and if I needed a ride. This is not nearly as creepy as it would be in the States; of course, Peace Corps doesn’t advocate hitchhiking as a rule, but nearly all of us do it anyway. Many of the “taxis” around town anyway are actually private cars that went to the bazaar and picked up a taxi sign to glue to the roof. There are actual taxi companies in the bigger cities, but there’s no medallion system here. Furthermore, even if you’re just standing on a street with your hand out for a matshruka, sometimes a private car will stop, taxi sign or no, and ask where you’re going. Some volunteers in the more remote villages where public transport doesn’t go are basically required to hitchhike if they want to leave their sites.
I’m close enough to a big city so it’s not a requirement, but I have caught a ride with a car once, when I was trying to get to the Dordoy bazaar on a Sunday (which was a major mistake). I had tried to flag down five or six matshrukas heading that way, but none would stop because they were full. Finally, after about twenty minutes and an attempt to hail the seventh matshruka, a small tan car skidded to a stop. A middle-aged woman opened the door, asked if I was going to Dordoy, and said that she and her son would take me there for twenty som.
More expensive than the matshruka, which is ten som. However, the car was nice and clean, the lady and her son seemed about as legit as can be, and it would be a far more comfortable ride than standing packed on a matshruka, assuming I could ever get one to stop for me. I agreed, and hopped in. Of course, when they passed by the main entrance to the bazaar, I was all like, “Great, this is the part where they rob me,” but it turns out the lady actually worked at the bazaar, and they were going in the back. She even helped me find the main entrance to the bazaar, after it had been made clear that I had no idea where I was going.
But I was definitely not getting in a car at night packed with drunk male twenty-somethings. declined the ride, assuring the driver (who was literally hanging out of the window by this point) that I was only walking home and was almost there. I managed to convince him, and watched somewhat warily as the car swerved around the bend in front of me, out of sight.
Finally, I found the billboard that my friend had described, and rested up against a rock ledge on the side of the road. Eventually my friend called, wondering what the hell had happened, and as it turns out, I had managed to locate her street.
I told her I’d never been so happy to see somebody in my life, and there’s a pretty good chance that it was true.
Ate a bowl of soup that the host mother offered, drank some chai, and all but collapsed into bed.
Cholpon-Ata, as I have learned, is a pretty damn small town, despite all the tourist hype it gets. I got a lot of flack from my host family and other Bishkekers about going to Issyk-Kul during the fall, as it’s far too cold to swim now, but not being able to swim didn’t bother me much. The next day my friend and I walked through town to the public beach, which was essentially deserted, and sat on the edge of the pier to shoot the shit. The lake was actually a remarkably pretty shade of blue, and the wind coming off it wasn’t unpleasantly cool. Mountains surround Issyk-Kul at all sides, so it’s not like the larger Great Lakes, where the water recedes directly into the horizon, but it’s still a damn big body of water.
Stayed another night, to the barely-concealed chagrin of the host mother. You see, me staying a second night means she had to feed me. This is one of the more frustrating things about the high respect given for guests here; in America, I could have just been like, “don’t feed me: I’ll either just go grab something or cook for myself,” but that doesn’t exactly work as well here. I’m the guest; ergo, I must be fed. She did make a particularly delicious laghman, though, which is kind of like noodle stir-fry soup. It’s a Dungan dish, and I hadn’t had it since training, since my new host family doesn’t seem to cook many Chinese-inspired dishes.
During the meal, she kept on mentioning how expensive food was and how loud Americans talked. Sigh. At least the food was good. She also had homemade thick crusty bread that was almost like a baguette.
Took a leisurely start the next morning, off to Karakol and Kyzl-Suu. Karakol is Kyrgyz for “black wrist,” and I’ve heard it’s probably a reference to the fertile valley’s soil and the people who worked it. It’s located on the far eastern side of the lake, and actually a little inland, and is Issyk-Kul’s administrative center. Kyzl-Suu is south from Karakol, on the southern side of the lake, and means “red water/river.” This has been a cause of merriment for those that live there, as one of the training villages is called “Krasneya Retchka,” which happens to be Russian for “red river.” So some of us moved from “red river” during training, to “red river” after training. C’mon, you know that makes you wanna lol.
The most remarkable part about my ride into Karakol was probably the fact that it was there I learned that Obama had won the election. I was about halfway through it when my phone was deluged with text messages, and I admit I grinned the rest of the trip. I still remain more cynical than not, but if he turns out to be half as good as he says he is, then it’s an extraordinary leap up from the last eight years. Hooray, my vote counted for something other than dissention this time! (Well, not actually, as they only count the absentee ballots when the state in question is close, but in theory I made a difference, dammit.) It was also refreshing to have an election that actually ended decisively and didn’t drag on and on and on for months.
But I met my friend in Karakol, and we pitted at another volunteer’s apartment where the host graciously hooked up the hot water heater for me to take a shower, and fired up a bowl of banana hookah for us to pass.
Showers are one of those rare things that just make me unbelievably happy when I can get them. Most families (who are rich enough to have them; several volunteers live in houses that have no bathing facilities) bathe by banya. I don’t mind banya, because, frankly, it gets the job done, and it also makes it easier to wash clothes than if I were living in a house with a shower. However, banya can never compete with a nice firm-pressured hot shower, or a deep tub. I still remain convinced that the Japanese have gotten bathing down to a wonderful science with onsen, but I do admit a strong liking for showers.
But the water heated up in about an hour, so after I had smoked my fill of hookah, I took my shower and we headed out to Kyzl-Suu.
Kyzl-Suu is about a half-hour outside of Karakol, and we got there and immediately went to an NGO where a JICA volunteer worked.
JICA is the Japanese version of the Peace Corps, and when we were originally given sites, I thought I was going to be in Issyk-Kul, since most JICAs are there and I had requested to be put near some. My Japanese is fuck-all rusty, though. We chilled at the JICA’s place for a bit, drank green tea, and she was generous enough to share some of her Japanese provisions with me. Red miso soup, here I come.
The evening was spent in the company of other Peace Corps volunteers and the JICA; we went to my friend’s house and cooked up some ash, or the southern version of plov. Plov is probably my favorite “Kyrgyz” dish, and it’s in quotations because I actually think it was originally Uzbek. It’s basically rice, garlic, carrots and meat cooked up with half a bottle of oil, but it’s really good. I like it best when mixed with fresh tomatoes, but since tomatoes are going out of season and becoming really expensive, a couple of fried eggs mounted on the top ain’t so bad either. Or with homemade pickles. Apparently you can also make a sweet fruit plov, with fruit juice, fruit pieces, and cinnamon as opposed to carrots, meat and garlic, but I’ve never had it.
Ash is the southern version of plov. One of the volunteers had come up from Jalalabad for the week, and had brought a bag of Uzgen rice with him. Uzgen is a region of Kyrgyzstan most prominently known for the rice it produces: brown and rich with a hint of nuttiness. I’m hoping they have some at the bazaar near me in Bishkek. It was fabulous; our ash was meatless, and also sported raisins. We also made a batch of banana bread to round out the feast.
After a heavenly night on my friend’s sofa (I had been sleeping on the floor prior), I packed up and headed out to Karakol since he was going to Bishkek. A bunch of volunteers headed out to Bishkek for the weekend to coincide with the fall break the majority of the teachers had. My friend invited me to travel back with him on Thursday, but the ride from Karakol to Bishkek is about six or seven hours, and I wanted the extra day in Karakol before I sat on a matshruka to get my teeth rattled out for that long.
My friend with the apartment in Karakol had work that day, so when I got back to the apartment, I basically had the run of the place to myself. Which I admit, was absolutely fabulous.
I’m a relatively social person, but like most Americans I crave privacy, which is pretty hard to come by in this part of the world. I hadn’t had a morning in a building by myself to just cook, watch movies, listen to music, and read books in a long time. I went to the bazaar and picked up some squash and made squash and oregano soup, which turned out to be pretty good, though it would have been better if I had a food processor.
I had half a mind to go out and see Karakol, but I admit that the lure of an empty apartment tempted me out of exploring. Besides, I’m sure I’ll be back in Karakol again at some point before I give up the ship here, so I’m not too concerned.
When it was edging into evening, a bunch of volunteers descended on the apartment like a time bomb, since the folk who didn’t leave for Bishkek on Thursday were all leaving on Friday, and my friend’s apartment was a close walk to the bus station.
The ride back to Bishkek was mostly uneventful, sans the beginning. I and two other volunteers got a somewhat later start, so we were heading to the bus station when a matshruka, heading for Bishkek, skidded to a stop in front of us. Of course, we were in the midst of hopping on when we saw that there were a bunch of other volunteers on the same matshruka.
Naturally, we were pleased, but it turned out that one of the group had valiantly offered to stay behind at the bus station and wait for the newcomers. Long story short, I was guilt tripped into staying behind so that the last volunteer didn’t have to make the sojourn alone. This wasn’t really a huge deal, as I was in no particular hurry anyway.
It takes about six hours to get from Karakol to Bishkek, and I don't think I was ever so happy to leave a vehicle as I was to get out of that matshruka. Matshruka isn’t necessarily a horrible way to travel, but it’s definitely not a comfortable way.
Back in Bishkek, I got talked into staying at the apartment with all the volunteers that came into the city to see each other (not that it was a hard sell, mind you), and shenanigans and good times were had by all.
And then I came home and promptly slept for about three days. And that, my friends, is the magic of break.
Thursday, November 13, 2008
Well, it’s finally happened. I got the formal eviction from my host family.
That’s probably a bit overstated, but the short of it is that I have a month to get all of my things out of this house and hit the road.
I learned about it yesterday, when my program manager came by my school to observe my counterpart and I teaching a class. I kind of felt bad that she came on this particular week: the first two days I was out with plague, and the heater in the school’s been broken, so the classes have been shortened from their usual forty minutes down to a paltry twenty five. I don’t even know why they bother; twenty five minutes is NOT enough to conduct a decent class in. When I was in high school, we only had twenty-five minute classes on “speed days,” at the beginning of each semester when we had all eight classes in one day. (At the time, my school was on block scheduling, so a normal day consisted of four, hour and a half long classes. Frankly, I think this is much preferable to the traditional seven-hour day with fifty-minute classes, as it gives the teachers more time to work with and it preps students for college classes, most of which are at least an hour and a half long.) We did nothing on speed days except for receive syllabi. But I digress.
The overall evaluation by my program manager was favorable, mostly because my counterpart is just this side of amazing and taught most of the class. I did a little game with the students at the end to bolster the “team-teaching” part of the drill, though that’s not how our classes are usually run. Typically, she primarily teaches the classes on Monday/Tuesday and the lesson is grammar-based, and I primarily teach the second class on Thursday/Friday, which uses the grammar points but leans towards the conversational. But due to my brush with plague, and the fact that it’s the week after break, and considering class time was halved, things were a little jacked up.
No matter. The program manager basically had nothing but good things to say… and then at the end, added a curious little addendum about stepping up the search for new housing for me. My counterpart assured her that we were already well on our way in the search, though not much of actual suitability had cropped up so far. I’m looking for a more independent option, either an apartment or a guesthouse. (Nearly everybody here has a guesthouse, it’s not a hallmark of the rich like it is in the States. Of course, they’re in varying states of repair – the one at my current house had an unfortunate slug infestation, as we found out during my birthday party – but the vast majority of people have compound housing. Usually the guesthouse is a one or two room building, sometimes with cooking facilities.) The guesthouse at my current family, aside from having more slugs than I’d like, is frequently used by other guests, plus has no real heating system, which is why I’ve got a room rather than the other house.
Most of what people had been offering was a room in a house, which is what I have now. The experience here hasn’t been entirely unsatisfactory; I’d say about eighty percent of the time, things are just fine. It’s the other twenty percent that gets me. I can’t be too upset about it, though: this is my third time in the homestay lottery (first time Japan, second time during PST), and the first two times were great. I figure it’s about my time to get one that’s more along the lines of a dud.
And, as stated before, it’s not all bad. In whole, I like my community and my workplace is about as good as it can get around these parts. The house is pretty darn nice by Kyrgyz standards: they’re certainly a lot richer than my PST host family. They don’t have vicious dogs. The older daughter speaks a modicum of English: probably around as much as I speak Russian.
The major downsides are the fact that my host mother is an incredible neatnik, to the point where it actively intrudes on my life. As I think I mentioned before, she was pissed off because I wasn’t vacuuming my room every single day, and that I had piles of books on the floor. I also can’t cook beans anymore because of the smell, and was almost forbidden from cooking with cinnamon until I threw a big enough fit about it. Now I just have to time my cooking with cinnamon with when she’s out of the house. (The problem with beans is that the prep cooking time with them is at least three hours, and usually I don’t get more than a couple hours of the day with the house to myself.) I also can’t cook in the kitchen if the family is eating in there; this usually doesn’t affect me much, but on the off days when the parents get back from the bazaar early enough to have lunch at the regular time, it does. A couple of times I had to wait an hour or two to start cooking lunch, and dammit, I was hungry. The younger host daughter can be teeth-gratingly obnoxious: just today, I had to deal with about an hour of her banging at the door and pulling at the knobs trying to get into my room after I had locked it. For a while, I was wondering if the groaning doors were simply going to give and bust out of the frame, which would be a fine piece of work to explain to the family. When that didn’t go in her favor, she went outside and banged on my window. It took her the better part of an hour to get bored and try to find something else to do. She also has a penchant for walking into my room whenever she feels like it, unless I lock it, and then she just stands outside wailing until either I let her in or her mother finally yells at her. If I do open the door to demand what she wants, she usually just says, “I’m bored.” When I do let her in, she tends to manhandle all my belongings without asking.
And I realize that some of this is due to a difference in culture: here, they don’t really ask before borrowing things, and it’s not like America where I would always knock before entering my parents’ or brother’s rooms, even if the door was wide open. The Kyrgyz have more of a what’s-yours-is-mine culture, especially among family. But I’m not actually family, and my laptop is an expensive piece of equipment. She doesn’t know how to use it, and I don’t want her to break it because she’s banging on all the keys like a deranged piano composer. It’s not a toy.
And it’s not as though she’s five: she’s nearly twelve.
But, anyway, my counterpart assured my program manager that we were on the hunt. My program manager then told us that we had about a month, because my host mother had called and said that I needed to be out by then.
I was mildly surprised, and asked my program manager why I had been ousted. A couple of weeks ago, the PM came over and had a mediation talk with my host family, after a major blowup regarding the cleanliness of my room. The subject of me moving out came up – my host mother wanted to know what happened after the three-month mandatory homestay period. My PM told her that it was up to the Volunteer and the family; some Volunteers stay with host families for the entire two-year duration, and others move out as soon as possible. (Though, I have noticed that virtually all the Volunteers who have the option to move into an apartment take it. None of the close-to-city Volunteers that I know still live with a host family, unless they’re like me and still under the three-month mandatory stay.)
I decided to be honest and admitted I was looking into moving out, and asked if there was a certain time I needed to be out by. At the time, my host mother said no. Now, though, I apparently need to be out because they want the room back, since lots of their family members pass through.
This is true, since the family is from down south, and they’re the only branch of it to be near Bishkek. Thus, when anybody comes up to the big city, they stay with my host family. There has been considerable traffic in and out of the house, but I have a hard time believing that they took on a Volunteer without taking that into account. Originally, my host sisters were asking me if I was going to stay the full two years, and were very much in favor of it.
In fact, I’m still getting asked that, primarily by the younger sister. She even asked me yesterday, the same day I found out that I had a month to be out of the house. I cocked my head and was like, “Uh, maybe.”
In some ways, I wonder if this is just a graceful way out for all of us. It sets a definite time limit for me to be out so my host mother gets her room back at a concrete date, and it also forces Peace Corps to seriously start putting pressure on the school to find me a place to live, rather than me just wanting to move out but be on an indefinite time schedule to do so. After the whole your-room-is-messy explosion, I had been planning to move out as soon as the three-month interterm was up. But then, I had pause, because all things considered, my room is very warm. It has a huge heater on one side of the room, and a long heating pipe on the other, and when they fire it up with coal, it’s warm enough for me to sleep comfortably in shorts and a t-shirt. I had been in the middle of that debate for a couple of weeks – freedom or not freezing to death? Freedom or not freezing to death? – but I guess this did me the favor of choosing for me. Freedom and freezing to death it is.
But the weird part about it is that my host mother hasn’t said anything to me. My program manager, when telling me, said that the host mother wanted her to break the news to me so she wouldn’t have to do it, which made sense, indirect culture and all. But now that everybody involved knows what’s going on… it’s just weird to not have had a conversation about it with my host mother. You know, ignoring the elephant in the room and all. I’m not sure if I should be the one to initiate it or not, or even what the hell I should say to even start that conversation. “So, you’re kicking me out in a month, huh?” seems a little… well, abrupt. But, I mean, we have to talk about it at some point, unless they’re just gonna wake up one day and I won’t be there anymore. I mean, if that’s how everybody wants it to roll, that’s cool, but it just seems a little too Jack Kerouac for me.
But I have to say that while the news was somewhat, well, shocking at first, I admit that I’ve never been so happy to be kicked out of something in my life. I went home and started packing away my summer clothes, and began sorting through things that I could throw away. Moving is going to be more of a bitch this time, as I’ve accumulated more things than when I arrived – work papers, groceries, a rice cooker, yet more books - but it’ll be doable. I could probably just call a taxi on the slated day, shove everything in it, and have ‘em drive to the new place. That’s the beauty of not owning furniture. If my current host family is feeling generous, they might even volunteer to drive me themselves, as they have one of those SUV/station wagon things.
I’m hoping that I can move someplace permanent this time, for two years. In the past six months I’ve moved four times, and am looking at my fifth in another month. Two of those times have been pretty major moves: first out of college permanently, then out of the country. It’s getting a bit tiresome.
Of course, this brings up the issue of where, exactly, I’m going to go. Despite how close it is to the capital (or maybe because of it) there aren’t many apartments in my village. The one real option I have right now that’s appealing to me is a shared house. There’s a family here, and the mother apparently used to work at the school I teach at. She now lives and works in Moscow, but still has a house here, where her daughter lives. The daughter is about my age, and currently lives there alone. From what I hear of the house, it’s extremely nice, and I’ve even heard rumors of an indoor toilet, which is quite enticing. I would live in the guesthouse and share the bathroom and the kitchen.
Doesn’t sound like a bad arrangement to me. I’d get a house, which means some kind of yard and more space to move around in, but have the privacy of an apartment. I could possibly become good friends with the daughter, or at the bare minimum she probably wouldn’t be banging on my window and trying to break down my door. The one big wrench in the plan was that the same arrangement was offered to the previous volunteer, but Peace Corps refused it because it was too much like a roommate situation.
One of the rules about housing is that Volunteers can’t live with anybody, be it another Volunteer or a host country national, in a roommate-type arrangement. It’s either living with a host family or living alone in an apartment. While I can sort of understand why they wouldn’t want Volunteers living together, I admit that I can’t quite wrap my head around why we can’t be roommates with (trustworthy) HCNs. Frankly, in many ways I think it’s preferable to living alone: there would at least be somebody there who spoke the native language (and in this case, it’s a genuine native Russian speaker, as opposed to a Kyrgyz family who speaks Russian on the side), and it would be a little less lonely, and probably more secure.
But my bigger argument is that this arrangement isn’t like a roommate situation at all. To me, having a “roommate” implies that you’re sharing an assigned living unit, usually an apartment, and splitting rent. Which… is not the case here, as the daughter owns the house and I’d be paying her rent. Furthermore, I know that some Volunteers live in a “family” with only one other person, and I know that other Volunteers live with families but eat no meals with them, and I even know of a Volunteer currently who lives in a straight up roommate situation. So, uh, I’m hoping that I can convince them, because I really do not want to have to live with another host family. I’m ready for some more space.
In addition, the previous volunteer in my village actually ended up living in Bishkek. Now, it’s been stated over and over that he was an exception, and I’ve heard varying stories as to how, exactly, he managed to be such a one. I would be over the moon to live in Bishkek and commute, but the problem there is that he had to supplement his income to support himself there, and all the other Volunteers that lived in Bishkek had to do the same. I don’t think I can afford to do that on my own dime. I would feel bad asking my parents to pay for me to live here; they’ve already footed a considerable amount of the bill for college. Besides, it just seems asinine to have to pay to be a Peace Corps Volunteer.
So, option one is to try and talk Peace Corps into letting me into the shared housing situation. Of course, I’d want to see the place first and meet the daughter, but to be entirely honest, it’s looking more and more like that or bust. And by “bust,” I mean living with another family in the same situation I’m in now. If it came down to it, though, I think I’d rather take a chance with another family than live with this one for the duration of my service (not that I have the choice now, but in theory). I’m just not comfortable here.
It’s just so frustrating, because I know I’m not a difficult person to get along with. In the past five years I’ve had two other host families, and four roommates. None of the major disagreements we’ve had have rotated around living styles. Not that there was never any “get your underwear off my side of the room,” rebukes, but nothing like this.
But, to a certain extent, I can see where the conflict is coming from, at least where the mother is concerned. In Kyrgyzstan, the house is the mother’s domain, where she reigns supreme and all is done to her specifications. In comes the American, with her own ways of doing things, and mode of cooking. One of the minor tiffs we had was over the cooking of garlic. Here, garlic is one of the last things you add to a dish. Whereas I vastly prefer the method of having it be one of the first things, sautéed with some onions and a bit of oil. The first time she saw me doing it, she bodily stopped me from adding the garlic, all like, “What are you doing? You don’t put in the garlic yet!” And I kind of looked at her strangely, before saying something along the lines of, “American cooking is different.” Once I was making a vegetable stew, and we had an argument over how many tomatoes I should add. I was putting in six, and she was absolutely adamant that I only needed two.
It still kind of weirds me out, because if there was a foreigner in my house, cooking a meal that only she herself was eating, I don’t think I’d try and stop her putting in the garlic whenever the hell she wanted. Hell, even if she was cooking a meal that I was going to eat, I think I’d just assume that she knew what she was doing. I would never tell my host mother not to put so many carrots in a plov or whatever. If I were attempting to cook manty, I would welcome her help, because she’s a pro. However, when I’m building a stir-fry, I’ll flatter myself by thinking I’ve got more experience in that arena.
It was explained to me during the intervention talk I had with my host mother that getting all up in my business is viewed as the mother’s job, especially because I’m female. She’s trying to better me in some ways, make me more fastidious about being clean and to know the proper usage of garlic. I know that she’s not singling me out: she’s always yelling at the two daughters about something or other, usually having something to do with how dirty the room is.
I suppose I can respect that method of parenting, at any rate it’s not really my business, but it just stresses me out. The day after she stormed into my room like hellfire and started yelling about how unacceptably dirty my entire life was, I had splitting headaches so bad that I couldn’t do anything else but curl up in front of my heater and listen to my blood pound in my ears. My current lifestyle is, by default, extremely stressful, and it makes it worse when the place where I live is a major source of the stress.
The younger sister, though, I simply can’t wrap my head around. I mean, I understand that twelve-year-olds can have a tendency to be hyperactive, but sometimes it just goes to an extreme. The whole hour-long battering at my door thing is an example: I had shut my door and told her I was going to get dressed for class, and not two minutes later she came back knocking. I opened the door to see what she wanted, just to make sure that there wasn’t something valid going on, and she said she was bored. I closed the door again, and immediately she knocked. I ignored her, because I had already explained what I was doing and clearly two minutes was not enough time for me to be dressed and ready again, especially because I was dressing business casual. As she stood outside for about a half hour, straining at the door, I just couldn’t understand. Clearly, I didn’t want her in there. What did she think was going to happen if she managed to break down the door? I was going to be pissed.
Part of the problem here is scheduling. As I think I mentioned before, on the mornings when I don’t have class until later, I’m the only other person in the house with the younger sister, since both parents are at work and the older sister has school in the morning. She typically doesn’t get that outlandish when the parents are around, because if I get too upset the mother will hear and that’ll be the end of it. I have talked to the parents about her occasionally, and they just tell me to smack her if she gets too obnoxious. Which, I’m sorry, but I’m not comfortable with doing. Besides, I don’t think I should have to hit a twelve-year-old to get the point across that the door is closed and she can’t be in my room at the moment. She’s not four, she’s not stupid or slow, and she’s not a dog. And it’s not as though my room is consistently barred; I do tend to keep the door closed most of the time, generally because I’m listening to music and I don’t want to disturb anybody, but when people knock, I nearly always let them in. I’ve also started keeping the door locked most of the time, which is unfortunate, but since the younger host sister almost never knocks, I keep it locked to make a point. And, also, to keep her from walking in on me naked, which has happened a couple of times. Her seeing me naked doesn’t really bother me all that much, but the lack of knocking does. Sometimes, the younger sister is just fine and it’s not a problem having her in my room. Sometimes, I have to bodily remove her from the premises and hold the door closed while she tries to force it open from the outside.
In my previous host family, I had a younger host sister at eight, and an younger host brother at ten. I never had issues with them. They always knocked when they wanted to come in, asked before they touched things, and so forth. I do know that the PST host families get considerably more training than the permanent site host families, and they’re also paid a lot more, but I also think that the children at my previous host family were simply better behaved as a whole.
So, hopefully this time next month I will have moved or be on my way to moving somewhere that won’t be so upsetting. The mother can have her room back to vacuum every hour on the hour, and maybe I can get some peace.
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